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Jusuke Hidaka
Editor-in-Chief
It is my great pleasure to announce Issue Number 30 of KONA Powder and particle Journal. I recently took over as the editor-in-chief of KONA Powder and Particle Journal as well as the director of Hosokawa Powder Technology Foundation (http://www.kona.or.jp/), which supports the publication of KONA.
This issue will be published as KONA 30 (2013) instead of KONA 30 (2012). The issuing year becomes 2013 because the date of issue has been revised from 10th December to 10th January in order to facilitate the count of the number of published papers in the year, which is to be used for the evaluation of the journal's impact factor.
This issue marks the 30th anniversary of KONA as an international journal serving a global community on an annual basis. It was thirty years ago that KONA was first published, by the Council of Powder Technology, Japan, to disseminate the high-quality powder-based research done in Japan to the world. “KONA” the title of this journal, means powder in Japanese. Now, as we approach the 30th anniversary of the journal, the word KONA has become symbolic of powder technology. KONA has also been international in the sense that it is edited by three editorial boards-one each in Asia, North America and Europe. A number of excellent papers from researchers around the world are accepted by each of the editorial boards.
Although the trends of development in powder technology differ slightly from country to country because of the unique characteristics of powder technology in each country, this technology has mostly been developed as an engineering approach for designing the powder handling operations and the powder process systems.
One of the steps toward the advancement of the modern society to a more plentiful, healthy, comfortable, and safe society is to develop new powder technology that would yield highly functional materials having the high performance required to realize such a society. Such new powder technology should be developed as engineering approaches and should include not only powder process engineering but also the production engineering capable of designing the functional materials.
Powder technology is said to be a “global growth engine for tomorrow” and about 70% of the final or intermediate products of materials processing industries are considered to be in particulate form. Research on powder technology is gaining ever-increasing importance in light of the ongoing innovations in the field of materials science and processing. In fact, it can generally be said that powder technology is one of the most important engineering fields for achieving progress and improvements in daily life.
I am certain that KONA will serve as an important platform for fruitful discussions on powder technology in the future as well. Finally, I truly hope to see KONA thrive and grow dynamically and continuously with support from both contributors and readers around the world.
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