Toward harmonious future innovations

Kikuo Fujita, Dean in FY 2022

Today, our society and life are surrounded and enhanced by various machines in the form of products, equipment, and services realized by those machines. The future demands more functional, efficient, safer, and more secure machinery. Such wishes to create new values through machinery spread in various fields, introducing innovative theories, close collaboration among multiple elements, integration across a broader area, and integration with information technology as footholds. However, behind such demands and possibilities, artifacts that include machinery have filled the earth. It results in various problems, including environmental issues and energy ones, increasingly becoming more severe. Therefore, mechanical engineering, which realizes the future of machinery, must create trans-disciplinary new science while deepening the traditional foundations from a future perspective by cooperating with various constraints.

In Osaka University, at both the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Division of Mechanical, Materials, and Manufacturing Science, School of Engineering, around 60 professors are performing various advanced research with recognizing the contexts mentioned above and the vision for harmonious future innovation, toward the innovation of mechanical engineering in their specialties under the organizational structure composed of four areas: Complex Mechanics, which  is to construct sound structures and mechanisms from the perspectives of forms and functions; Thermo and Fluid Dynamics, which is to appropriately manipulate materials and energy from the perspectives of heat and flow; Design and Integration, which is to weave holistic relations from parts to a whole from the perspectives of design and production; and Control and Intelligence, which is to implement intelligent devices of sophisticated behaviors from the perspectives of control and information. Furthermore, the arena of those areas provides world-class education programs in Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral Courses.

We hope all of you who have the will to engage in activities to develop the future will complete the above education programs according to your stage. We also hope those challenging various issues in society, including the industrial circle, will collaborate with academic initiatives of mechanical engineering to explore new possibilities.