(302d) Professor Daizo Kunii’ Encounter with Chemical Engineering

Daizo entered Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) , dreaming to succeed as a designer for high performance aircrafts. He had to give up his dream, however, because aircraft manufacturing was prohibited in Japan following the end of WWII. The department of aeronautics was renamed as the department of applied mathematics when he graduated.

He aspired to find a job as a researcher in engineering field and his chance meeting with Professor Sakae Yagi brought about his later accomplishments in the field of “chemical engineering,” which was quite new at that time of Japan. He joined Yagi’s laboratory at University of Tokyo and was given a chance to work on design calculation of industrial furnaces. He had coauthored two books on this topic with Yagi when he became the age of 30. Through these experiences, he acquired sense and knowledge on thermodynamics and geometrical modeling of practical reactors, as well as organizing complex systems.

He started works on heat transfer in fixed bed catalytic reactors, and derived Yagi and Kunii’s theoretical equation of the effective thermal conductivities in particle beds, which is one of the smart works in this period. At the end of 1950s He spent two years at Northwestern University with Professor J. M. Smith working on heat transfer in porous rocks and after returning to Japan, his topics of research have been extended to fluidization, moving beds, simultaneous heat and mass transfer, solid reactions, thermal cracking, combustion in complicated systems, etc.

All of these topics have evolved out of Professor Daizo Kunii’s willingness to challenge high peaks in the fog so that he could contribute to the well-being of the public. He was really a man of Samurai.