Led by Professor Zhuo Zhuang, Dean of Tsinghua University's School of Aerospace, a team of eight academic researchers from Tsinghua attended the workshop held at Swansea’s College of Engineering, which was hosted by Professor Javier Bonet, Head of College.

The Tsinghua visitors included Professor Xiong Zhang, Deputy Head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering, Professor Chunxiao Xu, Head of the Institute of Fluid Mechanics, and Professor Yinghua Liu, Deputy Head of the Institute of Solid Mechanics.

During the two-day workshop, more than 20 research presentations were given by academics from both institutions, which covered a wide range of research work in computational mechanics and computational engineering, including physically-based modelling for games and movies, computational fluid dynamics, computational biomedical engineering, modelling of morphing aircrafts, advanced finite element methods and particle-based methods.

Professor Richard B Davies, Vice-Chancellor of Swansea University, gave the welcome address at the official opening of the workshop.

"It was a great pleasure to welcome our distinguished guests from Tsinghua University to Swansea,” said Professor Davies. 

“I was delighted to hear about the fruitful research collaborations between the College of Engineering and Tsinghua University's School of Aerospace. Efficient research collaborations are built on friendship and trust, which I saw between our guests and my colleagues in the College of Engineering."

With more than 25,900 undergraduate and postgraduate students, Tsinghua University is widely regarded as China’s top university and it consistently ranks internationally as among the top 50 in the world.

The University was established in 1911, and its campus is situated on the former imperial gardens of the Qing Dynasty and surrounded by a number of historical sites in north-west Beijing.

The first Tsinghua-Swansea Joint Workshop of Computational Mechanics was held in Tsinghua in July 2011, attended by a team of nine academic researchers from Swansea.

Professor Javier Bonet, Head of College of Engineering, who led the 2011 Swansea delegation to China, added: “We were very pleased to host the second Swansea-Tsinghua workshop in Swansea.  After the success of the first workshop in 2011, a number of research collaborations have been initiated and facilitated between the two institutions. 

“These include the development of a series of joint research projects funded by the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Chinese Scholarship Council and British Council.

“Tsinghua has joined as a major partner in the Erasmus Mundus MSc Program of Computational Mechanics, led by Swansea University and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, which facilitates Master’s student exchanges and issues a joint MSc degree between Swansea University, Tsinghua University, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, École Centrale de Nantes, France, and the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

“We are also delighted our new Postgraduate Research Exchange in Engineering program has been launched, which facilitates PhD research student exchanges between Swansea and Tsinghua Universities.

“We look forward to continued, successful research collaborations between our two institutions."

Professor Zhuo Zhuang, pictured, Dean of Tsinghua University's School of Aerospace, said: "The first Tsinghua-Swansea workshop marked the beginning of the research partnership between our institutions. This strong research partnership has been strengthened again in the last few days during the second workshop and we have enjoyed every aspect of the visit to Swansea University.

“A number of research collaborations are ongoing, and new collaborative initiatives have been developed, and I would like to take this opportunity to invite our Swansea colleagues to visit us in Tsinghua next summer for the third Tsinghua-Swansea workshop."

Swansea-Tsinghua Postgraduate Research Exchange in Engineering programme

Swansea University’s College of Engineering recently established a new Postgraduate Research Exchange in Engineering programme with Tsinghua University.

The new five-year programme, which began last month, will see up to six postgraduate PhD students exchanged each year initially, for a period of between six to 12 months, in the research areas of aerospace, energy, and computer science.

The new programme is also driven by the ongoing research collaborations between research teams from the two institutions – significantly, the Sino-UK PhD Research Exchange Program, which is funded by the British Council and the Chinese Scholarship Council.

Dr Chenfeng Li, the programme’s coordinator at Swansea University’s College of Engineering, said: “Tsinghua University is undoubtedly China’s leading university, with great strength in the areas of engineering and technology, and Swansea University is a world leader in computational mechanics and computational engineering.

“This strategic partnership brings together the complementary strengths of each institution, which not only allows high-quality research to be conducted more efficiently, but also opens up new opportunities for international collaboration.”