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SUMMARY OF LABORATORY

[updated: April 2019]

Nakamura Laboratory was established in 1991 as a laboratory for research on structures & materials. Prof. Nakamura retired his career in March 2010, and Dr. Yamazaki started his career in Nihon University as a research associate in April 2012. Prof. Miyazaki and Prof. Yamazaki have supervised their students independently since April 2016, and Prof. Yamazaki was promoted to an associate professor and stared his laboratory in April, 2020. Now, Prof. Miyazaki manages this laboratory.


December 2016

Our laboratory mainly researches on the theory of dynamics of flexible structure and flexible multi-body dynamics and future large space structure. We apply the theory on the analysis of motion of space structures, and conducting experiments for validation of our theory. Furethermore, we develope nano-satellites by ourselves and has launched them by using Japanese or foreign rocket for space verification of our research.

Our laboratory has three pillers:

The first one is "create beautiful things". As for the development of nano-satellites, for example, we must make "beautiful" satellite. The theory, experiment, and numerical analysis code must be "beautiful". The most important is that we must ask ourselves "what is beautiful?" in each case. Off course it does not mean visible beauty. When we, researchers, feel it "beautiful", it involves something important, something valuable. We think it is necessary to have such a point of view in our research and development.

The second one is "investigate by oneself, think by oneself, decide by oneself, and challenge by oneself". We think the human society requires young people who take action by theirselves to accomplish something, and can obtain some valuable results. There are lots of social activities/events that try to create something by gathering the power of many participants. There are many people who organize such events. We think, however, they do not always act and create something by theirselves. The expect the ability of the participants, not themselves. In such cases, the things proceed very slowly, and finally, they finally need someone who takes action and creates something. There, "challenge" is most important. It is not sufficient to find someone who just do something, because it is meaningless and there occurs no revolution if he does very easy try to avoid the failure. We think our society will make revolution and get to higher level if we challenge for something that people think "thats's impossible", "that's wonderful if it is realized, but it cannot be realized". We hope the one who make such a challeng is evaluated and recognized as very important person in our society.

The third one is "do the best for success". You will think that's obvious. But on the other hand, people says "Don't be anxious about the result, don't afiraid of the falure in young age", "Experience lots of failue and learn from the failure".

The wisdoms "Learn from failure" and "Don't be afraid of failure" are definitely correct, and many people give the background and the meaning of these phrases. But the people who say "don't be afraid of failure" are often successful people, and we think this phrase is something like a magic spell that only successful person can make.

Our laboratory always keeps in mind that "challenge and success is most important", we must care enough for a result, and we must aim for success. If we tried to care enough for a result and did our best to attain it, we can learn exactly what was not enough when we got failure by our lack of ability, and then we can turn our failure into success.

In other words, only people who did thier best to get success can "learn from failure", and for this reason, "aiming for success" is important. If someone did not do his/her best, we think he/she may learn little or learn just only what everyone knows. In this sense, it is not easy to learn form failure and there are probably not so many people who can learn from failure.

It is obvious in the first place that we cannot necessarilly learn from failure in true sense, because we cannot prove that we have learnt from failure until we wil make sccuess.

It is not easy for many students to become a person needed by the world and to play an important role in the world. They need enough time to be ready for it. In this sense, a university laboratory is "the last defence" for students before they go out into the world (workplace), and one of its role is to make the students prepare enough to play a role in the world. In addition, it is one of joy for university laboratory that students and faculties realize together something people want to do. Thus Providing various opportunities to the studetns is the role of the laboratory. We hope the students in the laboratory take the opportunities, gain their experience, and improve theirselves. They (their parents) pay tuition (not cheap!), so that they should get enough return.

Keeping these in mind, our laboratory has the following activity policy:

  1. We create what is accepted in the world. (It must not be "a research just for research papers". It must not be only our own satisfaction. It must not be without vision for the future).
  2. We find the problem by ourselves and consider the way to solve it. We formulate the theory to solve it, and validate it by e.g. numerical simulation, and verify it by experiments.
  3. We accuire the skills to keep scientific investigation into the essence of the matter and to sense "what is important".
  4. We always utilize our every experience to the next oportunity, i.e. we never waste experience even if it seems trivial one.

We would like people to know about the joy of our activities. We will be happy if you can see the daily activities of our laboratory in the laboratory weblog.

Research in our laboratory is based on the following concept:

Any research is established after formulation of theory, numerical analysis, experiment, development and verification are all accomplished.
Off course some research can be established by ourselves and other one cannot. In the later case, we cwill ollaborate with other institutes. In ana case, we carry on the research keeping the above concept in our mind. In this point, nano-satellite project can be carried out by our own exertions. That's one of the reason why we have been carrying out the nano-satellite project.

Generally speaking, it is not easy for many people to take part in space development, so that research on space engineering often becomes "research for journal paper", "desk plan", "self-satisfaction or inside joke of some research group". This is quite terrible. (It seems that such research, i.e. play imitation of research, has not ended yet until now. We caution ourselves everyday that we must not be such fake researchers). We thank we should expose our research to experts, get frank comments, and spursue reseach based on the comments. Sometimes people other than researches or engineers give us quite valuable comments, too.

Our laboratory has been seeking to be always aware of them and to improve ourselves considering the social meaning of our research. In order not to lose ourselves, we would like to continue research collaboration with excellent reseachears/engineers, to show our research results to people as well as such researchers/engineers, and to get various suggestions on our research.

We think one of the advantages of our department or our laboratory is

you can enter the department at reasonable high school achievements, can get various interesting experience if you like, can improve yourself sufficiently, and can get the foundation to play the important role in the world before the graduation.
Join us and grow up with us!
[Miyazaki, March 2017]

College of Science and Technology, Nihon University
Department of Aerospace Engineering
Space Structure Systems Laboratory
College of Science and Technology, Nihon University
7-24-1 Narashinodai, Funabashi, Chiba 274-8501, Japan
e-mail: asel (at) forth.aero.cst.nihon-u.ac.jp