The event of the Diamond Princess, with a total of 712 (as of 17 March 2020) persons infected on the cruise ship, attracted global attention as the largest disease cluster outside China for the period 7 to 24 February 2020. Representing the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the authors were heavily engaged in the quarantine operation on the cruise ship ourselves. During the quarantine period from 5 to 23 February 2020, when the last group of the quarantined passengers left the ship, a series of measures have been conducted under the principles of i) zero deaths among all on board, ii) rapid establishment and thorough implementation of an infection control system, and iii) maintenance of health conditions and relief of anxieties among passengers and crew members. The case of Diamond Princess has implications of more than a cruise ship but deserves full scientific analysis to learn lessons from this operation as well as to study the characteristics, particularly the transmission of COVID-19.

Filled rubber is one of the most widely used materials in engineering products such as tires, conveyor belts, seismic isolators, and etc. Enhancing the mechanical properties of this material can contribute the society through the products with improved performances. For example, increasing the elastic modulus of rubber can improve the stiffness of tire tread blocks which is important for the handling performance of a vehicle. Also, decreasing the visco-elastic loss of it can reduce rolling resistance of tires which has a significant effect to the fuel consumption of a vehicle. Filled rubber is a nano-scale composite material composed of matrix polymers, fillers and some chemical agents. Usually the matrix material is made of natural or synthetic rubber polymer, and the filler is made of carbon black or silica. The mechanical properties such as elastic or visco-elastic responses of this material are determined by interactions between such nano-scale constituents. Because filler particles in rubber compounds aggregate together to build complex and random structures, high resolution nearly 1 nm is required to capture the structures precisely.

Unsteady aerodynamic and structural interactive analysis method for design and development of highly efficient low pressure last stage blades and results of its main application on very low load conditions are reported in this paper. Main features of this method are the enhanced analysis scope including very low load conditions and validations using measured data of real steam turbines including very low load conditions as well. Our schemes for this project were introducing boundary conditions from measured data in real steam turbines, full annulus all blade unsteady aerodynamic analysis and large scale parallel computing for unsteady structural analysis. The aerodynamic analysis results indicate that one root cause of the relatively large blade vibration at low load conditions seems to be a tip vortex induced by the blade windage. A modified method that introduced accurate structural analysis boundary condition data from aerodynamic analysis results is demonstrated. The structural analysis of a six-blade group with lacing wire dumping structure was performed.

The cost of preparing analysis and data handling is remarkable compared with the speedup from parallelization. Several studies have reported for a problem solving environment (PSE) or a cloud computer aided engineering (CAE) service. However, few studies have covered part of CAE process. This paper proposes design of cloud CAE platform and development of a web-based all-in-one CAE system. The platform design takes account of applying to large-scale analyses by imaging methods and data structures. Assembling them, we provide cloud CAE services. As numerical examples, we apply the system to some finite element analysis models. We confirmed that this system has ability for CAE work which has a hundred million degrees of freedom.