Advances in nature-guided materials processing

The center of excellence (COE) titled ‘The Creation of Nature-Guided Materials Processing’ has been established in Nagoya University as the 21st Century COE Program supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. In the Nature COE, various activities on the education and research are being performed through learning the laws of nature, namely, methods of attaining ‘appearance of the maximum function under the minimum substance and energy consumption’, which the nature and living organisms have acquired through their evolution in long period. Together with such educational programs for PhD students as research incentive, oversea training, and external evaluation programs, an ‘Open-Cluster Program’ was originated for promoting researches proposed by research groups consisting of young researchers in and out of the university and also for fostering them.

The researches are being advanced on materials used for living bodies, mimicking structures which nature or living bodies are forming, and producing materials by mimicking processes to form the structures observed in the nature or the living bodies. In this COE, these researches are conducted by four groups to extend the processes observed in the natural world to a new type of processing, that is, thoroughly examined and rationalized by plunging a scalpel of engineering and to establish a new academic field of materials science and engineering.