Fundamental study and Innovation

Hello everyone,

My name is Yoshihisa Hirano, one of the comittee members of genesis.
I am the first year of master of engineering program at the Department of Chemical System Engineering of Todai.

My main research at the lab is "Self-organization of nano particles".
(as the second research I study hydrogen storage & carriage for fuel cell vehicles)
Perhaps most of you would respond,
"What's self-...something? Is that really a research for the energy problem?"
My answer would be, "Absolutely no. It's a fundamental research".
In the lab I dry up water droplets that contains tiny particles, and observe how their structure changes as drying continues .
That's all my research.



Hearing it, some of you may think I am a kind of "ivory tower", or my research is pure science and disregards the market necessity.
It is almost true, but it is not all correct.

The points that I would like to address today are
1(Generally). Fundamental study drives innovation of technology.
2(As for my research). Drying phenomena is widely used in industrial "mass scale" production.
Products that relates to energy such as organic photovoltaic cell will be one of the examples. (The mixture of organic molecules is coated on a substrate and dried to form thin semiconducting layer for solar cells)

In this blog, I will write about my reseach and some other examples in which fundamental research inspired technology innovation in energy.