The Institute of Fluid Science, IFS, was originally founded in 1943 as the Institute of High-Speed Mechanics, and it was reorganized under director Shinichi Kamiyama in 1989 to become 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 the solving of 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 flows of all kinds, including the flow of 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 so forth, 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, which was in its 10th year, and newly established the Global Collaborative Research and Education Center for Integrated Flow Science (IFS-GCORE). The latter advocates a new concept, Integrated Fluid Science, which is based on 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.

The IFS currently has thirty-one research laboratories and one technical services division in total. 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), and the collaborative research division of Advanced Vehicle Technology Research III (Hitachi Astemo).

In 2010, the IFS was accredited as a Joint Usage / Research Center for fluid science by Japan’s MEXT, and it supports 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, the Advanced Flow Experimental Research Center (AFX), which operates several wind tunnel and shock wave related facilities, and the Aircraft Computational Science Center (ACS), which promotes research and education related to aerospace.

In 2015, the IFS VISION2030 was established, and the IFS aims to be a global research center for fluid science by 2030 by utilizing 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, which will contribute to the realization of a carbon neutral society. In addition, in September 2022, the IHI × Tohoku University Co-creation Research Center of Ammonia Value Chain for Carbon Neutrality was established by an IFS professor to expand industry-academia collaboration activities.

Today’s social issues are more complex and span a wide range of fields; and interdisciplinary collaboration and international cooperation are essential to solving them. The IFS will make continuous efforts to work on both basic and applied research through collaboration with domestic and international joint research partners, leveraging the special characteristics of Integrated Flow Science, which studies phenomena including all kinds of transports and chemical reactions. The ICFD, which has been held in Sendai every year since 2004, was held for the first time as a hybrid conference in 2022 and gathered a total of 610 participants (411 face-to-face), including 253 foreigners from 23 countries. This successfully demonstrated the function of the ICFD as an international networking space for Integrated Flow Science. We sincerely ask for your continued support, guidance, and encouragement.

January, 2023