On April 25th 2019, Professor Tongxi Yu from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology visited The Motion Structure Laboratory. During his stay, Professor Yu held a seminar in Hongyuan Report Hall at the School of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Yan Chen first gave a welcome speech and a brief introduction of his academic background. Professor Yu obtained his bachelor degree from Peking University in 1964 and his PhD. and DSc from Cambridge University. He was a professor at Peking University and reader at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Manchester, England. Since 1995, he joined HKUST as a professor and served in many important positions including the Dean of Fok Ying Tung Graduate School as well as Senior Advisor to VP-RG HKUST. Professor Yu's research interest has been focused on impact dynamics, plasticity, energy absorption, textile and cellular materials, and nano-composites. In these fields, he has published 4 textbooks and 3 scientific monographs. He is Fellow of ASME, IMechE and HKIE. Currently, he is Co-Editor of the International Journal of Mechanical Sciences (IJMS), and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Impact Engineering (IJIE). Due to his outstanding academic achievement, he was awarded Overseas fellow Churchill College, and got the China Higher Education Science and Technology Award (1st Class) in 2001.

      Professor Yu’s seminar focused on the comparison between the analytical modeling method and finite element modeling scheme. His talk was presented through a series of classical mechanics examples covering both the area of plasticity and impact engineering. The significant advantages of the analytical modeling scheme lie on tracing the key variables and capturing the essence of the underlying characteristics in a simple form, which is extremely difficult to do if relying only on FEA. At the meantime, he also talked about the complementary relationship among analytical modeling, experiments, and FEA. The seminar attracted a lot of attendees from other schools as well, including the School of Architecture and Engineering as well as School of Materials Science and Engineering. After the talk, Professor Yu answered many questions raised by the audiences and he shared his own experience about how to conduct analytical modeling, which was particularly beneficial for the researchers in this field.