From President

Inaugural Greetings from the President

To all the members of the Japan Explosive Society (JES), I am Akiko Matsuo of Keio University, who has been appointed as the president of the JES as of May 23, 2024. I would like to contribute of the JES as the president, over the next two years. I would like to ask you for your cooperation.

I am a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Keio University, Faculty of Science and Technology. My specialties include compressible fluid dynamics, combustion, computer simulation, space propulsion engineering, and explosion safety. Recently, I have been working on a number of research themes related to detonation engines. I think that many of the JES’s members are researchers or engineers in the chemical field, but my background is in aerospace engineering. Therefore, I only have a basic knowledge of chemical reactions for numerical analysis of combustion. I sincerely need the support of all the JES members and would be very grateful if you could support me.

My relationship with JES is probably best exemplified by my research into “explosion safety” and “interior ballistics”. In terms of explosion safety, I focused on the fluid phenomena “blast wave” that occur after an explosion and examined the propagation of blast waves and their behavior and the resulting damage. For example, we analyzed explosions at nuclear facilities and hypothetical explosions at rocket launch sites and fuel storage facilities. Depending on the amount of energy released, explosion phenomena can cause damage that exceeds expectations, so from the perspective of safety, it is necessary to consider the damage caused by blast waves in advance, and we were conducting research from this perspective. In addition, I was researching the unsteady phenomena that occur when the volume of a gun expands due to the combustion of solid fuel installed inside a cylinder and the accompanying increase in pressure. Until then, I had mainly been dealing with the analysis of combustion phenomena using gaseous fuel and oxidants, but I remember being very interested in the reproduction of combustion phenomena using solid fuel.

As I said at the beginning, I cannot fulfill my duties as President of this society without your support. I would like to ask for your support and assistance in various forms. Thank you.