Led by Professor Javier Bonet, Head of Swansea University’s College of Engineering, a team of nine academic researchers from Swansea attended the workshop, which was hosted by Professor Zhuo Zhuang, Dean of School of Aerospace at Tsingua, and his colleagues.

The workshop takes the existing research collaborations between researchers in Swansea and Tsinghua one step further, initiating a strategic long-term collaboration between Swansea’s College of Engineering and Tsinghua’s School of Aerospace in the field of Computational Mechanics and Computational Engineering.

Plans have been made for bilateral academic visits, exchange of research students, joint research projects, and the next Swansea-Tsinghua workshop, which will be held in Swansea in July 2012. 

Widely regarded as the best university in China, Tsinghua University is constantly ranked highly within the top 50 universities in the world in many international rankings. It has 28,000 students, among which 14,000 are undergraduates and 14,000 are postgraduates.

Tsinghua University has produced many notable graduates, especially in the political sphere. These include the current president Jin-Tao Hu, the current vice president Jin-Ping Xi and the current head of the National People's Congress Bang-Guo Wu. Tsinghua also has two Nobel Prize winners, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang.

In the workshop’s opening ceremony, Professor Zhuo Zhuang, Dean of the School of Aerospace at Tsinghua University, said: “The Civil and Computational Engineering Centre at Swansea University is renowned as a world leading research institute of Computational Mechanics and Computational Engineering for many decades. The long established international reputation of Swansea researchers started from Professor Zienkiewicz, who is generally respected as the father of finite element methods.

“We sincerely welcome the world leading researchers from Swansea to come to Tsinghua. I wish this joint workshop can serve as a platform for Tsinghua and Swansea researchers to exchange research ideas and discuss collaborations.”

Speaking at the workshop’s closing ceremony, Professor Javier Bonet (pictured) said: “We really enjoyed every aspect of the visit to Tsinghua University. The research presented by Tsinghua colleagues is at the highest quality; the campus where we stayed is very impressive, clearly one of the most beautiful campuses in the world.

“I’m glad to see that several promising research areas have been identified for further research collaborations, including particle methods, multiscale simulations, inverse problems and stochastic analysis etc.  I would like to take this opportunity to invite Tsinghua colleagues to visit us in Swansea next summer for the next Swansea-Tsinghua workshop.”

During the workshop, Professor Roger Owen FRS, FREng awarded the Emerald Literati Highly Commended Paper Award 2011 to Professor S Cen of Tsinghua University, Dr CF Li of Swansea University, and their colleagues, for their joint paper “Analytical trial function method for development of new 8-node plane element based on the variational principle containing Airy stress function”, recently published in Engineering Computations.

A wide range of research works in computational mechanics and computational engineering were presented during the workshop, including biomedical modelling, computational fluid dynamics, computational electro-magnetics, fluid-structure interaction, hp-FEM, inverse problems, mesh generation, multi-scale simulations, optimization, particle methods and stochastic analysis technology.

This College of Engineering news item has been posted by Bethan Evans, Swansea University Public Relations Office, Tel: 01792 295049 or email: b.w.evans@swansea.ac.uk.