Lab of nonlinear mechanics celebrates 20th birthday

The State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics (LNM) under the CAS Institute of Mechanics (IMECH) celebrated its 20th anniversary on 20 Dec, 2008.
Founded in 1988 as an open research hub for nonlinear mechanics of continuous media and officially approved as a State key lab in 2001, LNM is now an academic leader in the discipline, addressing basic issues like why solid materials undergo various catastrophic failures, ranging from aircraft fracture to earthquake; and how to explain, simulate and control turbulent flows.
At the celebration, LNM director HE Guowei welcomed experts, officials and students, some a hundred in all, to the gathering on Sunday morning. The lab has grown up into an outstanding and energetic research center over the recent two decades, says Prof. "Its staff membership expanded from 20 to 37, now including two CAS Members and five winners of the National Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. The lab has won multiple national research awards, and the number of its papers appeared in world-level scientific magazines in 2008 are 20-fold higher than those in the 1980s."
LNM conducts research into the state-of-the-art problems of nonlinear mechanics in advanced technologies. The adiabatic shear band, for instance, is one of the many mechanisms of failure occurring in metals and other materials that are deformed at a high rate during forming and machining or under ballistic impact, a subject on which LNM scientists have achieved tremendous success. Another example is the space-time correlation theory in turbulence, which improves the numerical prediction of turbulence-generated noise in civil and aeronautic engineering.
At present, the lab is in charge of eight national key projects concerning nano- and micro scale mechanics and trans-scale behavior, multi-scale dynamics theory and control principle of complex fluid flow and so on.
With increased support from the Ministry of Science and Technology, LNM will aim at multi-scale mechanics studies in the next five years, Prof. He noted, focusing on the multi-scale correlations in solid mechanics and multi-physics coupling in fluid mechanics.
According to Prof. He, there are three things that make LNM unique over the years: Original work with its independent projects -- not just after "fashion," experimentally motivated research with its theoretical exploring -- based on a comprehensively experimental platform with the multi-scale resolutions in space and time; and the priority to attract young scholars with special funds and policies.
Prof. ZHENG Zhemin, founder of LNM, a CAS and CAE academician and foreign associate of the US National Academy of Engineering, was invited to speak at the anniversary. Also present were CAS Member and Rinehart awardee Prof. BAI Yilong, CAE Member Prof. DU Shanyi, Director-general of IMECH Prof. FAN Jing, as well as officials from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and CAS bureaus.
Prof. YANG Wei from Zhejiang University and Prof. E. Bodenschatz from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization gave key-note speeches, after the anniversary, to declare the opening of the 2008 LNM annual academic meeting.