Lian-Ping Wang, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, has been elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for “pioneering contributions to multiphase turbulent flows,” work that has generated innovative computational methods, led to new predictive tools for multiphase flow, and laid the foundation for the development of next-generation weather and climate models.

Fewer than 3,500 of ASME’s 113,000-plus members have been recognized as fellows.

Wang, who is also affiliated with UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, studies how finite-size particles interact with fluid turbulence, a fundamental process for many industrial and environmental applications such as fluidized bed reactor, spray atomization, plankton life cycle in ocean water, sediment transport, warm rain initiation, volcanic ash eruption, dust storm, and sea spray.

He develops rigorous computational methods to probe and quantify particle-turbulence interactions and delivers physical models based on his numerical experiments. As a specific example, he recently investigated how air turbulence influences collision-coalescence of cloud droplets, a key process leading to precipitation formation. His parameterization of turbulent collision rate of cloud droplets has attracted attention from the international cloud physics community.

He has published over 100 journal papers covering computational methods, fluid mechanics, and atmospheric sciences.

Since 2003, Wang has been a regular visiting scientist to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a federally funded research and development center devoted to service, research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences.

In 2005, Wang was named an NCAR Faculty Fellow; and in 2014, he became an NCAR Affiliate Scientist. 

In 2012, he was appointed Chang Jiang Visiting Professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, and he began to develop new computational methods for complex flows that he is using to address transport processes in a wider range of turbulent multiphase flows than he could previously explore. In 2016, he was named an Invitation Fellow by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, which provides an opportunity for him to interact with Japanese researchers on multi-scale simulation and modeling of complex flows. 

Wang earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and engineering mechanics at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. He joined the UD faculty in 1994.

His research was listed among the top 50 most-cited articles in the Atmospheric Research journal in 2010 and 2011. His career honors include the Distinguished Overseas Scholar Award from China, UD’s Francis Alison Young Scholars Award and UD’s junior-faculty Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2011, he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).