The 6th ME Research Presentation Competition 2020

The 6th PolyU Mechanical Engineering Research Presentation Competition was successfully held at the Lecture Theatre in the Jockey Club Innovation Tower, PolyU, on 19 Nov 2020. It is an annual event for research students to display their research project results and share knowledge with the PolyU community. This year, it was an unprecedented period to organize the event. Considering the social distancing measures on COVID-19, the function was confined to the competition participants and the department staff. It was not open to others. Instead of voting for the competition based on popularity, we formed a panel of judges by ME academic staff. Twenty-three research student participants each delivered a high-impact brief presentation within 3-minute. With their professional and animated presentation materials, most of the participants demonstrated good academic pitching skills. The panel of judges was impressed by the performance of the participants this year. After the oral presentations, participants interacted with the panel individually in the research posters exhibition. Displayed posters not only highlighted their research project results, but it was also an occasion for participants to convey their ideas, communicate with professionals, and let their talents be known. Congratulations to their fabulous presentations and excellent research work! Champion Student: Miss FANG Jieyichen Supervisor: Dr JIAO Zengbao Title: Stability of precipitation strengthened high-entropy alloys at intermediate temperatures Champion Student: Mr SHI Xingyi Supervisor: Dr AN Liang Title: Energizing Fuel Cells with an Electrically Rechargeable Liquid Fuel 2nd Runner-Up Student: Mr ZHAO Qingxiang Supervisor: Dr Henry CHU Title: A Soft Pipe-Climbing Robot Merit Student: Mr ARIF Muhammad Irsalan Supervisor: Dr Randolph LEUNG Title: Study of Passive Methods for Airfoil Tonal Noise Reduction using Fluid-Structure Interactions Merit Student: Mr WEN Weisong Supervisor: Prof. WEN Chih-Yung Title: 3D LiDAR Aided GNSS and Its Tightly Coupled Integration with INS Via Factor Graph Optimization Merit Student: Mr ZHOU Pengyu Supervisor: Prof. SU Zhongqing Title: An inkjet-printed, flexible, ultra-broadband nanocomposite film sensor for ultrasonics-based health monitoring More photos on PHOTO GALLERY

107th Departmental Advisory Committee Meeting

The 107th Departmental Advisory Committee (DAC) meeting was held online on 17 November 2020, under the chairmanship of Ir Dr Angus HW Cheung, Chief Executive Officer of Aerovision Technology Limited. We were grateful to have new committee members joining us. They were Mr Chan Hing Keung (Deputy General Manager – Train Services & Systems Engineering, MTR Corporation Limited), Mr Edmond Lai (Chief Digital Officer, Hong Kong Productivity Council), Dr Chengmao Xu (President of the Corporate Research Center, Midea Group) as well as one of the two student representatives, Mr Chan Yan Kit Jeffrey (full-time BEng student). It was a very fruitful meeting as members, with their wide range of expertise, had provided very valuable advices and constructive suggestions to the Department of its effort and proposals in the future developments in teaching and learning, research and consultancy, and strategic plans.

Impactful Technology Innovation for New Generation Vehicle Seats Addressing Comfort and Health Issues

The Nonlinear dynamics, Vibration, & Control (NDVC) research team in the ME department led by Dr XJ Jing has kept cutting-edge and pioneering R&D activities with industrial impact. A recent technology innovation project, addressing comfort and health issues of professional bus/truck drivers, is successfully conducted and now comes to its benchmark stage, which was secured with nearly HK$4 million funded by the Hong Kong ITF via the Automotive Platforms and Application Systems R&D Centre (ITF-APAS), with additional associated Postdoc and internship programs more than HK$2 million in early this year. The project has been implemented under a close collaboration with industrial sponsors from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou etc, which contribute with not only in-cash support about HK$450K but also facilities, materials and necessary equipment, under an ambitious commercialization plan, and now comes to a new stage with industrial prototypes done, top journal papers published, and patents filed or to be filed. Vehicle vibration can lead to serious occupational problems to professional bus/truck drivers, including lower back pain, muscle fatigue, spinal column disease, digestive system diseases and other cardiovascular system effects. The related occupational safety and health issues have therefore attracted many social attentions in recent years from trade unions, doctors and governmental departments (Fig01). The commonly-used practice for vibration suppression in most buses, trucks or coaches relies only on a built-in suspension system of vehicles when they were produced, and there is no any specific method for the healthcare issue. Although driver seats can be specially designed, most have no effective consideration on vibration suppression. Importantly, existing vibration isolation or suppression methods are often not working well due to a number of reasons (low performance or high cost), and this further creates a serious and challenging issue to the area of vibration control (Fig02). To solve these technical challenges and to address important social concerns, this project is to develop new generation vehicle seats, targeting effective and cost-efficient methods for improving occupational health of professional drivers (Fig03). New vehicle seats will be designed with an innovative award-winning bio-inspired nonlinear anti-vibration technology, which can achieve a special nonlinear stiffness beneficial to vibration control, and the novel anti-vibration mechanism is embedded in existing seat design which leads to no instalment and arrangement changes to existing seat structures. New vehicle seats can be adaptable to different payloads and would provide on-line alarming or assessment on historic and current sitting health. This project would provide a benchmark and unique product in this area solving the mentioned problems, and the developed anti-vibration technology in this project would also bring significant benefit to many other engineering areas for vibration isolation and suppression.

ME PhD Graduate Won Best Paper Award in 21st ILASS-Asia 2020

Dr Chengming He, a PhD graduate of PolyU Department of Mechanical Engineering, won the Best Paper Award in the 21st Annual Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray System (ILASS-Asia 2020) held in Zhenjiang, China on 23-26 October 2020. He presented a paper “A computational study of spinning effects on bouncing and coalescence of head-on colliding droplets”. The corresponding author of the paper is his PhD supervisor, Dr Peng Zhang. ILASS-Asia, the Institute for Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems, Asia, was established in 1991 as an outgrowth of the International Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems (ICLASS). It was built for the mutual exchange of scientific and technical ideas in all field related to atomization and spray at Asia area. Dr Chengming He received his PhD degree under the supervision of Dr Peng Zhang in 2020. Currently, he is a Research Associate of State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

ME researchers awarded 2019 Highly Cited Review Paper of Applied Energy, Elsevier

The paper entitled “Recent advances in fuel cells based propulsion systems for unmanned aerial vehicles” collaborated by Prof. Chih-Yung Wen and Dr Liang An was awarded the 2019 Highly Cited Review Paper of Applied Energy, which is a peer-reviewed academic journal with an impact factor of 8.848 and a ranking of 6/143 (Top 3.8%) in “Engineering, Chemical” Subject Category in 2019 JCR Science Edition. This work provides a general description of the working principle of fuel cells and the category of unmanned aerial vehicles, introduces two types of propulsion systems that involve fuel cells, i.e., pure fuel cell system and hybrid system, describes the design methods and simulation cases, as well as summarizes the practical flight tests. Mr Zhefei Pan, a PhD student in the Department supervised by Dr An and Prof. Wen, is the first author. Read the full text at Sciencedirect The selection criterion for this award is based on the data source of Scopus, which is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database of peer-review literature, covering 50 million documents published in over 21,000 journals, book series and conference proceedings by some 5,000 publishers. The selection is limited to articles published in Applied Energy between 2018-2019. The most highly cited 30 research papers and 20 reviews published in respectively 2018 and 2019 have been selected (measured as total cites by 20th August 2020). The awards will be presented during the ICAE 2020 conference. Read more at Elsevier

ME Scholars ranked among the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Citation

The world-class research produced by ME scholars has been recognized in different global rankings.  According to an recent index compiled by Stanford University, 15 ME academics (10 of them are current ME members) of PolyU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) have been ranked among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in their main disciplines for career-long citation impact. Among them, Prof. Chen Guohua has been ranked among the top 20 scientists in the world in his respective fields.  The scholars were named in the “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators” compiled by Stanford University. A research team, led by Professor John Ioannidis, created the database of more than 100,000 top scientists across the world on the basis of standardized citation indicators. They were grouped into 22 subject fields and 176 sub-fields using the indicators. The indicators included information on citations, an individual’s scientific research output, co-authorship and a composite indicator for career-long citation impact up to the end of 2019. The recognition reflects the significant influence and research excellence of the Department’s scientists, who are committed to furthering their knowledge for the benefit of the world. Congratulations to the following ME scholars who have been ranked among the top 2% of scientists in the world in their respective fields: Dr An Liang Prof. Chan Tat Leung Prof. Chen Guohua Prof. Cheng Li Prof. Cheung Chun Shun Prof. Fu Mingwang Dr Jing Xingjian Prof. Wallace Leung Prof. Shi Sanqiang Prof. Su Zhongqing Prof. Ronald So Ming Cho (Emeritus Professor) Prof. Woo Chung-Ho (Emeritus Professor) Prof.  (former staff) Prof. Zhou Limin (former staff) Prof. Zhou Yu (former staff) Data available at Elsevier Published: 8 October 2020 | Version 2 | DOI:10.17632/btchxktzyw.2 View the report

Dr An Liang received China’s Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2020

Four young researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have been awarded funding from China’s Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2020. Each researcher will receive RMB1.2 million to conduct pioneering research in Hong Kong over a period of three years. Dr An Liang, Associate Professor of Department of Mechanical Engineering, is one of the awardees. With his research titled “Flow and Heat/Mass Transfer in Electrochemical Energy Systems”, Dr An has systematically studied the characteristics of flow and mass transport in a complex microporous structure in which electrochemical reactions occur, and achieved a number of innovative results. The primary objective of this project is to investigate key issues related to flow and heat/mass transfer in electrochemical energy systems at different scales. Under the National Natural Science Foundation of China, China’s Excellent Young Scientists Fund has been extended to young scientists in Hong Kong and Macau for applications from eight designated universities since 2019. It aims to support young scientists (under 38 for male and under 40 for female) who have attained outstanding achievements in fundamental research to pursue innovative research in areas of their choice, fostering them to be internationally leading scholars in their respective fields. It is encouraging to see that young scientist from the Department is acclaimed by the Nation to further develop scientific research in cutting-edge technologies.

Novel rapid indoor air quality and electricity usage monitoring system

As the COVID19 pandemic has caused people to spend more time indoors, it has become increasingly important to monitor indoor air quality. Dr Anthony Law, Adjunct Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration of the Campus Sustainability Office and Department of Building Services Engineering of PolyU jointly developed a novel “Rapid indoor air quality and electricity usage monitoring system”. By installing sensors and releasing tracer gas at locations like wet markets and restaurants, the system can automatically track and analyse airborne transmission path of viruses. The system was piloted on campus in early 2020 and will be used in the community through collaboration with local green organisations. 理大最新研發空氣監測系統　助疫情下追蹤空氣病源 【橙新聞】 10 Sep 2020 理大研發新空氣質素監測系統　可推算室內病毒傳播範圍 【Now新聞台】 2 Sep 2020 理大研發新空氣監測系統 可推算室內新冠病毒傳播範圍 【頭條日報】 2 Sep 2020 理大研發室內空氣質素監測系統　可分析食肆換氣率及污染物走向 【香港01】 2 Sep 2020 理大研發空氣質素監測系統　可用於餐廳街市追蹤污染物 【明報】 2 Sep 2020

ME researchers and collaborators developed untethered soft robotics with staked graphene assembly

Developing untethered soft robots with programmable configurations is of great value yet a grand challenge in robotics. Recently, this challenge has been successfully attempted by a research team led by Dr Haimin Yao, Associate Professor from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), jointly with Dr Tao Chen, Professor from Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research team started with the transferring of a layer of stacked graphene assembly (SGA) on a polyethylene (PE) substrate. The as-prepared SGA/PE bilayer exhibits curling behavior upon the variation of temperature (Fig. 1a, d). More interestingly, if an SGA/PE bilayer is pre-treated with a tempering process (heating followed by cooling) in a constrained space, it will coil spontaneously into a roll when it is freed (Fig. 1a-c). Surprisingly, the PE layer now is wrapped inside the SGA layer, which is opposite to that of the un-tempered sample. Such unusual morphing behavior of SGA/PE bilayer was found attributed to the asymmetric elastoplastic property of the SGA layer as demonstrated by the molecular dynamics simulations (Fig. 2a, b). It is the asymmetric elastoplastic property of SGA that allows them to prepare a variety of morphing systems with programmable initial morphologies (Fig. 3). These structures can be further assembled to construct more complicated actuation systems, such as artificial mimosa (Movie 1). More importantly, the tempered SGA/PE roll can achieve rolling locomotion under infrared lighting, resulting in an untethered light-driven motor (Movie 2). “Our work not only demonstrates an alternative strategy in creating untethered soft robots and reconfigurable devices but also provides a new philosophy for fabricating 2D material-based smart materials and structures,” said Dr Yao. This work has been recently published in Nature Communications [“Asymmetric elastoplasticity of stacked graphene assembly actualizes programmable untethered soft robotics”, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18214-0]. Ms Yang Gao and Mr Anran Wei, two PolyU ME PhD graduates are the co-first authors and Dr Yao is one of the corresponding authors.

ME PhD Student won Young Professionals Grant for INTER-NOISE 2020

PolyU ME PhD student Muhammad Irsalan Arif won the prestigious Young Professionals Grant (YP Grant) for the 49th International Congress on Noise Control Engineering (INTER-NOISE 2020) to be held on 23-26 August 2020 in Seoul, Korea. The goal of the grant is to encourage students/young engineers to attend INTER-NOISE Congress and Mentoring Workshop. The Workshop provides mentorship on professional skills (networking, communication, job skills etc.) and allows Young Professional Awardees to hold informal discussions with world renowned experts in the field of acoustics. The INTER-NOISE Congresses are the largest international gathering of experts in noise control engineering held each year. The INTER-NOISE Congresses have been held annually since 1972 at venues around the world. The Congresses include a large technical program consisting of papers and posters on all topics of noise control engineering. The congresses also include an exhibition of the latest products and instrumentation for noise control engineering. INTER-NOISE provides the best opportunity for engineers and scientists in all fields of acoustics to learn about and share their work with peers from around the world. The YP Grant is highly competitive where the participants from all around the world submit their applications based on their research work. The applications are reviewed by an International Institute of Noise Control Engineering (I-INCE) judging panel and only few applications are selected for the grant. Muhammad Irsalan Arif applied regarding his research work on the development of a novel noise control methodology for airfoil tonal noise based on flow-induced vibration of an elastic panel. The methodology is superior to conventional approaches as it provides remarkable noise reduction yet does not sacrifice any airfoil aerodynamics. This feature is considered extremely beneficial for devising next generation aircraft wing noise control. The research idea has been highly rated by the judging panel and his application is selected for the YP Grant. Muhammad Irsalan Arif is currently working under the supervision of Dr Randolph Leung, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.