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An accelerator-driven deuterium-lithium (d-Li) stripping reaction-type neutron source, such as the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) planned by the International Energy Agency is recognized as one of the most promising facility to obtain test environments of high-energy neutrons for fusion reactor materials development. The limitation on the available irradiation volume of the irradiation facility requires the development of the small specimen test techniques (SSTT). Application of SSTT to evaluate the degradation of various components in the light water reactor for the life extension is expected to be also quite beneficial.A remote-controlled testing machine for the Small Punch (SP) and miniaturized tensile tests was developed at the hot laboratory of the Japan Materials Testing Reactor (JMTR). The machine is designed for testing at temperatures ranging between 93 and 1, 123K to evaluate the temperature dependence of the strength of materials including the embrittlement at low temperatures and the softening at elevated temperatures. The tests are performed in a vacuum or in an inert gas environment.The machine has been installed in a hot cell and is being used for the round robin test program of the SP test method. The round robin test program is planned to identify the capability of the test method and to establish a standard test procedure. The configuration and the specifications of the test machine are introduced and the results of the SP tests are also shown.

Irradiation assisted stress corrosion cracking (IASCC) is considered to be one of the key issues from a viewpoint of the life management of core components in the aged Light Water Reactors (LWRs). To simulate IASCC behavior by the in-pile IASCC experiment or post-irradiation experiment (PIE), it is necessary to irradiate specimens up to a neutron fluence that is higher than the so-called IASCC threshold fluence in a test reactor. There are, however, some technical hurdles to overcome for the experiments. For the in-pile IASCC test, techniques assembling pre-irradiated specimens into an in-pile test capsule in a hot cell by remote handling are necessary, and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) developed the techniques for the in-pile test to be carried out in the Japan Material Testing Reactor (JMTR). To examine crack growth and crack initiation behaviors under neutron irradiation, pre-irradiated specimens were relocated from pre-irradiation capsules to an in-pile capsule. Hence, a remote welding machine has been newly developed and welding work for inner and outer tubes of capsule are carried out with rotating of the capsule. The other hurdle is the material integrity of the capsule of the capsule housing for a long term irradiation. Since the changes in microstructure, micro chemistry and mechanical properties of materials increase with neutron fluence, the integrity for capsules of long irradiation period was evaluated by tensile tests in the air and slow strain rate test (SSRT) in oxygenated water. Specimens were obtained from the outer tubes of capsule irradiated to 1.0–3.9 × 1026 n/m2 (E> 1 MeV) previously. Elongation more than 15% in tensile test at 423 K was confirmed and no IGSCC fraction was shown in SSRT at 423 K which was estimated as temperature at the outer tubes of the capsule under irradiation.Copyright © 2008 by ASME

We wished to examine the spatial (gain) and temporal (rise time) properties of human optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) as a function of stimulus velocity and field location. Stimuli were either M-scaled random dots or vertical stripes that moved at velocities between 20–80 deg s−1. Three field conditions were examined: full field; a 20 deg central field; and a 12.5 deg central-field mask. OKN gain was found to be significantly affected by stimulus velocity and stimulus location, with the higher stimulus velocities and the 12.5 deg central-field mask giving lower gains. Steady-state gains for all three field conditions were not found to be affected by prior adaptation to stationary or moving stimuli. The 63% rise time was found to be significantly affected by the stimulus velocity, whereas this was not the case for the 90% rise time. Neither rise time was found to be significantly affected by the field location. These results indicate that, although the effectiveness (gain) of peripheral retina is lower than that of the central retina during optokinetic stimulation, the peripheral retina has access to common mechanisms responsible for the fast component of OKN.

We used body sway to evaluate a viewer's sense of presence with three kinds of 3D displays as follows: a head mounted display (HMD), a 70 inch 3D display and a consumer 3D television. This expedient used images with a fixed foreground and a rolling background as the visual stimuli to induce body sway. The images were taken from a boat rolling at five different frequencies (approx. 0.125, 0.20, 0.25, 0.33, 0.50 Hz). We examined eight healthy adults viewing each of the five images for three minutes on each display. We evaluated body sway using a motion analyzing system to measure the displacement of a marker placed on the head of the subjects. It was found that at all rolling frequencies of the image background, the HMD induced the greatest amount of body sway followed by the large 3D display and then the consumer 3D television. The amount of body sway was the greatest when the rolling frequency was 0.33 Hz. The results showed the amount of body sway depended on the type of display and the rolling frequency.

We perceive the egocentric position and velocity of ourselves by many senses, such as vision, proprioception and vestibular sense. Normally the information by these senses is in harmony. However, there are situations in which the information is inharmonious. When we watch a wide-screen monitor or we ride in an accelerating or turning vehicle, visual information conflicts with proprioceptive and vestibular information. Since human egocentric perception has been studied for each separate sense in the previous research, it is not clear how the integration among these senses contributes to perception of human orientation. In Experiment 1, we investigated the contribution of visual, proprioceptive and vestibular information in isolation and in combination to perception of direction of forward self-motion. An observer rode in small vehicle (vestibular information) or walked (proprioceptive information) through a narrow corridor. Many vertical bars were hung from a ceiling of the corridor. When the observer moved forward, she/he viewed expanding optic flow of the bars (visual information) through video cameras and a helmet-mounted stereoscopic display. By fastening the observer and/or the cameras at different angles, consistent or conflicting information about forward direction was given through each sense. It was found that when there was conflicting information about the direction of forward motion (a) vestibular information was more dominant than visual cute, (b) visual and proprioceptive information was linearly added with weighting, and (c) visual information was dominant for backward motion. In Experiment 2, we investigated sensory integration when we moved forward with linear acceleration. Direction of the acceleration was either forward or sideways, namely corresponding to a ride in an accelerating or turning vehicle. We developed a new method to measure sensation or self-motion more objectively by using the three-dimensional position-sensor system. Positions of observer's head, shoulder, waist and ankle were measured to find body tilt accompanied by sensation of self-motion. It was found that the body tilted towards the opposite direction of the self-acceleration and the angle of body tilt was in good agreement with the subjective amount of the accelerating sensation. The body tilt was even induced by solely visual information. This implied that visual information contributed to perception of self-acceleration as well as self-motion.

This study examined the effects on visual functions of a prolonged handling task within the helmet-mounted display environment. Both version eye movement and accommodative response became gradually slower during the 40-min task. Although delayed presentation of display after head movement noticeably worsened both visual responses, presentation delay after hand movement did not significantly change the sluggishness of responses. Therefore it is suggested that decreasing time delay after head movement is a more important factor in order to improve human performance of handling tasks within the HMD environment.

Previous studies have generally considered heading perception to be a visual task. However, since judgments of heading direction are required only during self-motion, there are several other relevant senses which could provide supplementary and, in some cases, necessary information to make accurate and precise judgments of the direction of self-motion. We assessed the contributions of several of these senses using tasks chosen to reflect the reference system used by each sensory modality. Head-pointing and rod-pointing tasks were performed in which subjects aligned either the head or an unseen pointer with the direction of motion during whole body linear motion. Passive visual and vestibular stimulation was generated by accelerating subjects at sub- or supravestibular thresholds down a linear track. The motor-kinesthetic system was stimulated by having subjects actively walk along the track. A helmet-mounted optical system, fixed either on the cart used to provide passive visual or vestibular information or on the walker used in the active walking conditions, provided a stereoscopic display of an optical flow field. Subjects could be positioned at any orientation relative to the heading, and heading judgments were obtained using unimodal visual, vestibular, or walking cues, or combined visual-vestibular and visual-walking cues. Vision alone resulted in reasonably precise and accurate head-pointing judgments (0.3° constant errors, 2.9° variable errors), but not rod-pointing judgments (3.5° constant errors, 5.9° variable errors). Concordant visual-walking stimulation slightly decreased the variable errors and reduced constant pointing errors to close to zero, while head-pointing errors were unaffected. Concordant visual-vestibular stimulation did not facilitate either response. Stimulation of the vestibular system in the absence of vision produced imprecise rod-pointing responses, while variable and constant pointing errors in the active walking condition were comparable to those obtained in the visual condition. During active self-motion, subjects made large headpointing undershoots when visual information was not available. These results suggest that while vision provides sufficient information to identify the heading direction, it cannot, in isolation, be used to guide the motor response required to point toward or move in the direction of self-motion.

Several psychophysical procedures have been used to measure cyclovergence but none has been adequately validated with respect to an objective measure. Scleral search coils were used to measure cyclovergence induced by dichoptic textured patterns which cyclorotated in antiphase through 6 degrees at frequencies between 0.05 and 2 Hz. In one psychophysical procedure subjects nulled the apparent oscillatory motion of radial nonius lines superimposed on a small black disc at the center of a large cyclorotating display. In the second, subjects nulled the apparent inclination in depth of a vertical line displayed in the same way. The amplitude of cyclovergence measured objectively and the magnitude of oscillation of the nonius lines were similar at low stimulus frequencies. At higher frequencies of cyclorotation, both amplitudes declined but the nonius amplitude exceeded that of cyclovergence. The apparent inclination of the vertical test line, as indicated by the nulling procedure, also declined with increasing frequency of cyclorotation, but not at the same rate. At low frequencies, the apparent inclination of the test line was greater than that corresponding to the cyclodisparity induced into the line and almost as great as that corresponding to the relative disparity between the oscillating pattern and the line. The implications of these results for measuring cyclovergence and for an understanding of stimuli driving cyclovergence and perceived inclination in depth are discussed.

It has often been reported that, in the absence of information about the direction of illumination, people interpret surface convexities and concavities in accordance with the assumption that illumination comes from above. However, ‘above’ could mean with reference to gravity, the head or the retina. Yonas et al reported that four-year-old infants use the head more than gravity as the frame of reference in interpreting surface relief but that seven-year-olds make about equal use of the two frames of reference. The potency of these two frames of reference when acting separately and when pitted against each other was measured on adult subjects. For all subjects the ‘assumption’ about the direction of illumination was predominantly with respect to the head. The gravitational frame was used only when the headcentric frame was irrevelant, and then not consistently.

In Experiment 1 we investigated the independent and combined effects of horizontal OKN of stationary edges and occlusion of the central retina. For a display 60 degrees wide moving at 30 degrees/sec a symmetrically placed pair of vertical nonoccluding bars suppressed OKN when near the center of the display but had no effect when 30 degrees apart. A 7 degrees-high 60 degrees-wide central occluder reduced OKN gain by 37%. However, a central occluder with edges only 30 degrees wide abolished OKN. In Experiment 2 this interaction between central occlusion and stationary edges was confirmed with a wider display over a range of stimulus velocities and configurations. A functional explanation of this interaction is presented.

The additivity of flicker responses produced by two different wavelengths λ1 and λ2 was investigated for five adapting levels of 560 nm by the summation-index method. A summation-index value of σ of 0.30 was obtained for all conditions employed, confirming the linear property of the achromatic channel. The additivity of unique chromatic responses, red, yellow, green, and blue, was also investigated with the same method. In this case the wavelengths λ1 and λ2 were chosen in a spectral region to produce one of the four unique colors and the summation index was measured for the color with the cancellation method. A summation index of 0.30 was found for the green and blue sensations and also for the red sensation if both stimuli were from the same spectral region. A slight additivity failure of the enhancement type was found for pairs λ1 and λ2 λ1 was in the short-wavelength region while λ2 was in the long-wavelength region. An additivity failure of the same type was found for the yellow chromatic sensation when λ2 was 607 nm and λ1 was 570, 550, or 533 nm, the last combination giving a summation index of as much as 0.64. The results imply the existence of two different cones whose responses do not add linearly to yield the yellow sensation.

It has previously been shown that when a moving and a stationary display are superimposed, illusory self-rotation (circular vection) is induced only when the moving display appears as the background. Three experiments are reported on the extent to which illusory forward self-motion (forward vection) induced by a looming display is inhibited by a superimposed stationary display as a function of the size and location of the stationary display and of the depth between the stationary and looming displays. Results showed that forward vection was controlled by the display that was perceived as the background, and background stationary displays suppressed forward vection by about the same amount whatever their size and eccentricity. Also, the perception of foreground — background properties of competing displays determined which controlled forward vection, and this control was not tied to specific depth cues. The inhibitory effect of a stationary background on forward vection was, however, weaker than that found with circular vection. This difference makes sense because, for forward body motion, the image of a distant scene is virtually stationary whereas, when the body rotates, it is not.

Previous experiments to decide whether the gain of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) is increased or decreased by occlusion of the central retina involved the use of stationary edges on the occluder and unmatched contrasts. With these factors controlled, it was confirmed that OKN gain is severely reduced by occlusion of the central retina but only at stimulus velocities above about 30°/sec. The gain of horizontal OKN was found not to increase with increasing width of the display if the lateral edges are blurred. The high gain of centrally driven OKN may be related to the ability of higher mammals to stabilize the images of objects at a given distance in a complex parallactic visual field.

We examined the phenomenon in which two physically aligned monocular stimuli appear to be non-collinear when each of them is located in binocular regions that are at different depth planes. Using monocular bars embedded in binocular random-dot areas that are at different depths, we manipulated properties of the binocular areas and examined their effect on the perceived direction and depth of the monocular stimuli. Results showed that (1) the relative visual direction and perceived depth of the monocular bars depended on the binocular disparity and the dot density of the binocular areas, and (2) the visual direction, but not the depth, depended on the width of the binocular regions. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that monocular stimuli are treated by the visual system as binocular stimuli that have acquired the properties of their binocular surrounds. Moreover, partial correlation analysis suggests that the visual system utilizes both the disparity information of the binocular areas and the perceived depth of the monocular bars in determining the relative visual direction of the bars.

Luminous efficiencies obtained for a small test field of 2.3' showed a simple and narrow type of curve regardless of experimental methods, flicker photometry and heterochromatic brightness matching. Past available data of luminous efficiencies for small fields were collected from published papers and plotted together on one graph, from which a single curve was derived to represent the luminous efficiency function for point sources. The function resembled the CIE V(λ).

In afoveate animals, and in neonatal or cortically deficient foveate animals, monocular optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) is controlled by directly innervated subcortical nuclei and occurs only in response to temporonasal motion. In higher mammals, the subcortical nuclei receive direct inputs predominantly from the nasal hemiretinae and indirect inputs from the visual cortex. These indirect inputs counterbalance the directional asymmetry of the primitive mechanism. These facts lead to the prediction that the velocity of the slow phase of OKN in the normal human adult should be higher for stimuli moving centripetally rather than centrifugally in each monocular and binocular hemified. The predicted patterns of directional preponderance were found in both monocular and binocular hemifields. Directional asymmetries were still present in monocular hemifields when the central retina was occluded and were reduced when the stimulus was confined to a narrow central strip of the visual field. These results are discussed in terms of the contributions of the central and peripheral retina to directional preponderance.

It has previously been reported that illusory self-rotation (circular vection) is most effectively induced by the more distant of two moving displays. Experiments are reported in which the relative effectiveness of two superimposed displays in generating circular vection as a function of (i) the separation in depth between them, (ii) their perceived relative distances, and (iii) which display was in the plane of focus was investigated. Circular vection was governed by the motion of the display that was perceived to be the more distant, even when it was actually nearer. However, actual or perceived distance was found to be not the crucial factor in circular vection because even when the distance between the two displays was virtually zero, vection was controlled by the display perceived to be in the background. When the displays were well separated in depth, vection was not affected by whether the near or the far display was in the plane of focus, nor by which display was fixed or pursued by the eyes.

Random-dot techniques were used to examine the interactions between the depth cues of dynamic occlusion and motion parallax in the perception of three-dimensional (3-D) structures, in two different situations: (a) when an observer moved laterally with respect to a rigid 3-D structure, and (b) when surfaces at different distances moved with respect to a stationary observer. In condition (a), the extent of accretion/deletion (dynamic occlusion) and the amount of relative motion (motion parallax) were both linked to the motion of the observer. When the two cues specified opposite, and therefore contradictory, depth orders, the perceived order in depth of the simulated surfaces was dependent on the magnitude of the depth separation. For small depth separations, motion parallax determined the perceived order, whereas for large separations it was determined by dynamic occlusion. In condition (b), where the motion parallax cues for depth order were inherently ambiguous, depth order was determined principally by the unambiguous occlusion information.

Luminous-efficiency functions for small fields were measured with flicker photometry and heterochromatic brightness-matching methods for the same two subjects. For the larger stimuli (22.9 and 11.5'), the luminous-efficiency functions differed between the two methods. Those obtained by flicker photometry showed a simple narrow shape, whereas those obtained by heterochromatic brightness matching showed increased sensitivity at short and long wavelengths. The difference however, decreased as the stimulus was reduced to 2.3', and the luminous-efficiency functions converged to curves that resemble the CIE V (lambda ) or Judd's modification. It seems unnecessary to introduce a new luminous-efficiency function for point sources, which is fortunate for practical purposes.