Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a rapidly growing branch of fluid mechanics with exciting new applications across industries, all the way from aerospace engineering to regenerative medicine. Recent advancements in computer technology have accelerated the development of numerical algorithms and software to perform CFD analysis.

At the frontier of these efforts is HKUST’s appointed Stephen Kam Chuen Cheong Professor of Science, Professor Kun Xu. Already serving as Head and Chair Professor in HKUST’s Department of Mathematics and Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Professor Xu is a world authority in applied mathematics, with a research focus on CFD and rarefied gas dynamics.

It is difficult to imagine a scholar more deserving of appointment as Named Professor than Professor Xu. After graduating from Peking University in 1987, he undertook a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Columbia University, one of the US’s elite Ivy League institutions. He went on to pursue post-doctoral research at another Ivy League university, Princeton, before joining HKUST in 1996.

The last few decades have seen Professor Xu make great strides forward in the development of numerical algorithms for CFD. One of his early research breakthroughs came in 2001, when he designed an improved gas-kinetic scheme for numerically solving the Navier–Stokes equations, which can be used to model the physics of many phenomena of interest to scientists and engineers, from ocean currents to air flow around the wing of an aircraft. Professor Xu’s novel numerical method has been widely integrated into computational packages and commercial software across industries.

Among his many other significant achievements is the development of a unified gas-kinetic scheme in 2010 and a unified gas-kinetic wave-particle method in 2020, which established a foundation for simulating multiscale transport. The schemes developed have been widely applied in radiative transfer and air-vehicle design for near space flight. Indeed, the direct modeling framework developed progressively by Professor Xu in the last 30 years is now routinely used for the computation of multiscale transport in rarefied gases, radiation, plasma, gas-particle two phase flow and more.

Unsurprisingly, Professor Xu’s pioneering research has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, with more than 200 articles to date. In 2021, his book A Unified Computational Fluid Dynamics Framework from Rarefied to Continuum Regimes was published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. Professor Xu’s research contribution is also well reflected in the many citations he receives and his editorship of major journals. He currently serves as Editor in Chief of Advances in Aerodynamics and Associated Editor of Communications in Computational Physics, the International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics, and Computers and Fluids.

Having benefited from Professor Xu’s leadership and expertise for nearly two decades, HKUST is delighted to honour the achievements of this outstanding scholar with a Named Professorship.