Fluids and thermal engineering (FTE) is one of core branches in modern engineering. It roots from fundamental studies on fluid mechanics, heat transfer, thermodynamics and combustion. This discipline has triggered a wide spectrum of significant innovations and inventions, which substantially improved our life quality and radically shaped our today’s industrial civilization. FTE is a cornerstone discipline underpinning a large variety of industrial sectors, such as power machinery, power electronics, aerospace exploration and renewable energy. It is also playing a vital role in many other engineering fields, including sustainable manufacturing, green energy and healthcare technologies, to name a few.

The key task of FTE group will boost our core research strengths in FTE areas with national and international recognition, and offer 360-degree support for members’ research activities, such as academic/industrial cooperation, grant/patent application, lab construction, supports for key discipline/lab building, external exchange and network aids, PhD/MRes coordination, et al. We believe these activities will be favorable drive to our faculty’s 2025 research targets, and bring about positive improvement of our university’s reputation and influence in the related engineering communities.

Professor Yong Shi, Head, Research Group of Fluids and Thermal Engineering 

• Micro/nanoscale flows, mass and heat transfer,
• Design of microfluidics and lab on a chip,
• Thermal management for energy systems,
• Multiscale (micro, meso and macro) modeling,
• Physicochemical transport processes in energy conversion and storage devices (batteries, fuel cells, internal combustion engines and supercapacitors),
• Thermal issues in intelligent manufacturing and 3D printing,
• Kinetic theory of gases,
• Space micropropulsion,
• Multiphase flows and heat transfer,
• Sustainable energy technologies, sustainable building modeling,
• Machine learning approaches for thermofluids and energy analyses.