The Institute of Fluid Science, IFS, was originally founded in 1943 as the Institute of High-Speed Mechanics, and it was reorganized in 1989 under Director Shinichi Kamiyama to form the current Institute of Fluid Science. The mission and goals of the IFS are to promote world-class research that merges advanced fields based on fluid science, apply them to priority science and technology areas, and contribute to solving various social problems. Furthermore, the IFS aims to foster next-generation researchers and engineers of international standards through our research activities. Fluid science is an academic field that not only deals with the flow of matter, but with various flows, including heat, energy, and even information. From a macroscopic perspective, it deals with the flow of gasses, liquids, and solids as continuum flows, and with the flow of molecules, atoms, and charged particles from a microscopic perspective. Keywords associated with our research activities include energy and environment, aerospace and machinery, medical engineering, new electric devices, high-performance materials and materials science, fluid systems and we deal with a wide range of multiscale physics, both temporally and spatially.

In October 2022, the Institute reorganized its Innovative Energy Research Center and newly established the Global Collaborative Research and Education Center for Integrated Flow Science (IFS-GCORE). The latter promotes a new concept, Integrated Flow Science, grounded in a solid academic foundation of fluid science research and includes finding solutions to social issues in diverse applied fields. We will promote international collaborative research on fluids and materials by supporting the general international activities of the GCORE, as well as integrating and strengthening the activities of the Lyon Center, which has achieved great results through organizational collaboration between Japan and France. With this reorganization, we aim to greatly expand the scope of collaborative research to cutting-edge fields including carbon neutral studies and advanced semiconductors, and contribute to solving various social issues. As of 2024, the IFS has 31 research laboratories. This consists of three research divisions (Creative Flow Research Division, Complex Flow Research Division, and Nanoscale Flow Research Division), two research centers (IFS-GCORE and Lyon Center).

In 2010, the IFS was accredited as a Joint Usage / Research Center for fluid science by Japan’s MEXT, and it has been supporting over 100 collaborative research projects with domestic and overseas collaborators every year, in addition to the joint research conducted by individual research funds. Furthermore, to strengthen and promote research activities, the IFS also includes the Advanced Fluid Information Research Center (AFI), which operates a high-performance supercomputer, and the Advanced Flow Experimental Research Center (AFX), which operates several wind tunnel and shock wave related facilities.

In 2015, the IFS VISION2030 was established, and the IFS aims to be a global research center for fluid science by 2030 by utilizing the global joint research networks. In 2021, a small revision was made to the VISION2030, under which we will continue to strengthen Integrated Flow Science as a fundamental academic basis and conduct research and educational activities toward the realization of a sustainable and advanced society. Under this new vision, we also started the JSPS Core-to-Core project of international research exchange for ammonia combustion and materials from FY2021. In addition, in September 2022, the IHI × Tohoku University Co-creation Research Center of Ammonia Value Chain for Carbon Neutrality was established. From October 2024, a large-scale international collaboration project, HYCOMBS, for hydrogen and fuel ammonia utilizations supported by CREATE, Singapore was initiated with several academic institutions of UK, France, Norway, and Singapore.

Today’s social issues are complex and span a wide range of fields; interdisciplinary collaboration and international cooperation are essential to addressing them. The IFS will make continuous efforts to work on both basic and applied research though collaboration with domestic and international joint research partners, leveraging the special characteristics of the Integrated Flow Science, which investigates phenomena including all kinds of transports and chemical reactions. The ICFD, which has been held in Sendai every year since 2004, was held as a hybrid conference in 2024 and gathered a total of 756 participants, including 340 foreigners from 24 countries. This successfully demonstrated the function of the ICFD as an international networking platform for the Integrated Flow Science. We sincerely ask for your continued support, guidance, and encouragement.

January, 2025