Fluidization centennial and the decades of research and development in Japan

This paper gives an overview of the last 100 years of fluidization in the Japanese context. Japan was a relatively early adopter of the Winkler coal gasification technology in industry and an early participator in the formation of chemical engineering initiated in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, it was left far behind in the rapid development of fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) technology in the worsening international relations of the 1930s. Academic research on fluidization and its applications, which had started with the development of FCC, did not start substantially in Japan until 1952, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect. In this paper, first reviewed is the global progress of chemical engineering and fluidization research, and further discussed is the three-stage scheme in the development of the knowledge of fluidization. Taking these as the background, we review first the pre-war and early post-war research situations, then, the formation of the fluidization community in Japan. Finally, the fully-fledged post-war research and technological developments with a brief look at the Japanese contribution to the above-mentioned global progress are reviewed regarding the three fields: energy-environment applications, catalytic reactors and numerical simulation.