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The Shiba is a miniature and robust goat native to Japan. A female Shiba has no seasonal gestation. In a closed ecosystem, the goat is expected to be a useful animal for eating crop leavings and providing meat and milk to humans. To find a practical way of recycling the feces from Shiba goats in the closed ecosystem, we examined mushrooms cultivated on the beds of ground and sterilized feces supplemented with roughage and without. In a thermal and humid controlled incubator, oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) and shiitake mushroom (Lentinus edodes) were cultivated. After 60 days, oyster mushrooms had grown on the beds of feces supplemented with roughage. Shiitake mushrooms failed to grow due to the lack of hyphae growth.

A higher versatility is required from medium size bulldozers as vehicles other than large size bulldozers. Therefore the design concept of the transmission for medium size bulldozers has to be changed to that of large size bulldozers. We adopted combination of high capacity torque convertor and low reduction (high output speed) cross ratio gear train for medium size bulldozers' transmission. We also evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of rotating clutches, and decided not to use the rotating clutches in new transmission for medium size bulldozers, because of their disadvantages. By these design concepts and material technology, we can reduce the transmission size and improve the efficiency.

Vibration Damping Composite Steel Sheets (VDC) have recently been developed as a new material to satisfy the requirements concerning various types of noise and vibration control for various fields such as automobiles, electric appliances and building materials. Requirement for VDC continues to expand, because VDC, consisting of two steel sheets and a layer of visco-elastic synthetic resin, which is sandwiched between the two steel sheets, has an excellent damping capability. However, it is rather difficult to spot weld the VDC, as it has an electrically insulating resin layer. To improve the weldability, metal particle is generally mixed into the resin. For automotive body panels, VDC is required to have not only high vibration damping capability but also superior properties such as weldability, bonding strength and formability. In this study, the effects of metal particle size and volume fraction on these properties have been investigated.