Generation of High-Gravity Field and Application to Materials Science

Centrifugation of organic liquids and metals has been widely used in biochemistry field and metallurgy field, respectively. The high-gravity field was recently used for the preprocessing for sintering of composite materials. The sedimentation of atoms was recently realized in alloys and semiconductors under ultra-high gravitational field in 1 million G level. The possibility in use of high gravity has, day by day, increased. In this mini-symposium, the conventional and recent methods for materials processing for functionally graded materials, metastable composite materials, thin film, etc. using high-gravity in gas, liquids, solids and also in vacuum will be treated. In this paper, the history of ultracentrifuges is reviewed, and the applications to materials science is discussed.