Static calorimetry is a powerful mean in research and development of industrial materials. However, it has not been previously applied so much, because of the complicated handling of calorimeter and the lack of knowledge of the calorimetry. In this article, the fundamentals of static calorimetry correlated with the basic thermodynamics and the development of the recent calorimeters were reported, and the application examples to the four different fields of the research and the development of the industrial materials were described. In regard to an application of calorimetry to surface chemistry, basic principle on the heats of adsorption and immersion, and several examples for characterization of porous solids by the adsorption microcalorimetry were introduced. Various types of calorimeters as conduction, isoperibol, and adiabatic calorimeter have been widely used for the development of industrial materials and the quality control of cement in the construction field. Significance of biological wastes recycling and microbial activity in high-moisture biological wastes were described. Heats of mixing measurements for various kinds of binary mixtures containing fluorobutylmethylether, which were carried out to find the more effective solvent as the rinse of industrial creaming process, were explained.

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Barium titanate single crystals doped with KF (Ba_1-xK_xTiO_3-xF_x with x≤0.1) have been successfully grown; the ferroelectric Curie temperature T_C decreases with increasing x. Moreover, the crystal with x=0.1 has a large dielectric constant of ε'=1200 and has a large piezoelectric constant of d₃₃=300pC N^-1 at room temperature. On the other hand, in barium dititanate (BaTi₂O₅) single crystals, a spontaneous polarization of 7μC cm^-2 has been observed at room temperature. The ε' measured at 1MHz reaches very large value of approximately 30000 at the ferroelectric Curie temperature of T_C=750K, while the dielectric loss tanδ remains small at values below 0.1 at around T_C. dielectric, thermal and structural properties of the single crystals are described in detail.

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High-resolution thermal expansion measurements of solids provide a very useful and complimentary (to heat capacity) method for studying the thermodynamics of solid-state systems. In this short review, first, different measurement techniques are discussed with special emphasis given to capacitance dilatometry. Then, recent results on the thermal expansion of the high-temperature superconductor (HTSC) YBa₂Cu₃O_x are presented and used to discuss uniaxial pressure effects of T_c, the nature of superconducting fluctuations and oxygen-vacancy ordering in YBa₂Cu₃O_x.

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A study on phase transition behavior of sphingophospholipid-water system was performed for the highly asymmetric chain length N-lignoceroylsphingomyelin (C24:0-SM) with a differential scanning microcalorimetry (DSC). The C24:0-SM was partially synthesized by a deacylation-reacylation process with naturally occurring sphingomyelin used as a starting material. The C24:0-SM showed a low-temperature phase transition of the subgel-to-gel phase (T_S), successively followed by the common phase transition of the gel-to-liquid crystal phase (T_M). The T_S transition enthalpy decreased with an increase in periods of thermal annealing performed at the T_M transition temperature. This indicated that the T_M transition accompanies a change in the packing mode which proceeds very slowly up to the annealing periods of 9h. In this accord, the electron micrographs of the subgel phase showed a drastic structural change of planer bilayer stacks into multilamellar vesicles and finally into small size unilamellar vesicles, which appear with increasing the periods of the annealing.

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Atomic force microscopy (AFM) enabled us to investigate the statistical properties of single polymer chains by a method called as “nanofishing”, which stretched a single polymer chain adsorbed on a substrate with its one end by picking it at another end. A force-extension curve obtained for a single polystyrene chain in a θ solvent (cyclohexane) showed a good agreement with a worm-like chain model, and thus gave microscopic information about entropic elasticity. Solvent effects on polymer chain conformations were also discussed. Nanofishing technique was extended for dynamic viscoelasitc measurement of single polymer chains. AFM cantilever was mechanically oscillated at its resonant frequency during stretching process. By this technique, we could quantitatively and simultaneously estimate elongation-dependent changes of stiffness and viscosity of a single chain itself with using a phenomenological model. The solvent effect on the viscosity in low extension regions was ensured that the viscosity under about 10kHz perturbation was attributed to monomer-solvent friction. These methods were proved to be powerful to give the experimental proofs against several basic questions in polymer physics and furthermore will unveil hidden properties of polymer chains or polymer solutions by any macroscopic measurements in the future.

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