Senior Staff Scientist, Applied Shock Physics Laboratory, USA

Dr. Takao Kobayashi is currently a Senior Staff Scientist in the Applied Shock Physics Laboratory and also a member of Center of Fracture Physics at SRI International.
He received a BS degree (1966) from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan, and MS (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, USA. He served the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (1972-1982), where he worked with Professors George R. Irwin and James W. Dally on rapid crack propagation and arrest problems funded by Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He moved to SRI International in 1982 and began developing a technique for reconstructing the fracture process using fracture surface topography information. This technique is now known as FRASTA. He developed the software for a computer controlled system consisting of a confocal-optics microscope and an x-y-θ stage. This has become known as a FRASTAscope and has been licensed to NASA Langley Research Center, Osaka Gas, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at Nagasaki, and Chubu Electrical Power Company, Nagoya.
From 1986 to 1988 he taught at the Nagoya Institute of Technology as a Full Professor and initiated development of a technology utilizing dry ice as a high-speed projectile that found application in metal forming.
1988 he returned to SRI as a Senior Staff Scientist and worked on many projects including further development of FRASTA and its application, true-stress-true-strain characterization of thin duplex stainless steel sheet at temperatures up to 1000 °C, and testing of composite fracture properties at liquid helium temperature.
He has published over 90 technical papers. The paper, co-authored with Donald A. Shockey, published in the Journal of Failure Analysis in 2012, “Replaying the Fracture Process of a Failed Space Shuttle Orbiter Thruster,” received a Best Paper Award.