hr. J. Hcur Muss TrunsJ+r.

Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 739-740, 1992

Pergamon Press plc.Printed in Great Britain

Chinese Academician,Professor Bu-Xuanon his 70th Birthday

PROFESSOR Bu-Xuan
Wang(formerlyPu-Hsuan
Wang), Chinese Academician,celebrates
his 70th
birthday this year. It gives us great pleasure on thisoccasion to offer our sincere congratulations
on hislife-long and multifaceted
contributions
to thermalscience in general, and heat and mass transfer in particular.
Professor Wang was born on 5 February 1922 inJiangsu Province, China. He received his BSc. degreefrom Tsinghua
Universityin 1943 and his M.Sc.
degree from Purdue University (U.S.A.) in 1949. bothin mechanicalengineering.
He joined Beijing University (then Peking University) in 1950 and became
an associate
professor
in 1951. He returned
toTsinghua
University
the following
year and wasappointed
full professor in 1961. In 1980, he waselected Academicianof the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the highest honor a scientist or scholar in China
may have.
Professor Wang’s research activities covered a variety of subjects, including heat and mass transfer processes in porous media, thermophysicalproperties,
measuring
techniques,biomedical
heat transfer,energy planning and solar energy utilization.
Most
noteworthy
among his contributions
are the study offilm boiling heat transfer in subcooled liquid flowing
at high velocities and the simultaneousheat andmoisturetransport
in unsaturated
and saturated
porous media. His basic research on the film boilingof subcooled liquid flowing at higher velocity along asolid surface and on the evaporationof liquid drops
on solid surface from 1981 to 1987, won the 4th
National Natural Science Prize in 1989, which is themost prestigious award in natural science in China.

Wang

Very recently, he proposed a new explanationof theclassical Leverett’s capillary hysteresis phenomenon
with a postulated‘minimum gradient’ assumption,such that the isothermal flow would happen only whenthe magnitude of driving potential gradient exceeds
this minimum value. A method has been establishedto determine, experimentally,
the minimum gradientand capillary potential of wet porous media. While thegeneration of new knowledge is central in Professor
Wang’s research, a number of projects he undertook
were prompted by national needs. From 1963 to 1966,
he led a research team seeking to accelerate the synthesis of ammonia in a large Sichuan plant by enhancing heat transfer through a redesign of the heatexchanger to obtain a more favourable temperature
distribution
in the piled catalyst. The effort resulted
in a doubling of the daily production.
During 1974
1978, he conducted studies on the reforming of thefrozen soil in Qinghai Plateau in order that the railroad bed could be adequately supported in all seasons.
In the course of his research, he has supervised a dozen
doctoral theses since the natianal degree system wasestablishedin the 1980s and has over 120 refereed
papers to his credit during the last ten years.
Professor Wang has been an influential thinker
and effective spokesman
for China’s engineering
education. As early as 1952, he instituted the Teaching& Research Group on Thermodynamics
and Heat
Transfer in Tsinghua University.
In 1955, he wasappointed
a member of the National
Long-Range
Research Planning Committee.
Two years later, he
proposed the establishmentof the then new disciplineof ‘Engineering
Thermophysics’in universities
throughout
China. He is a founding member of the139

740

B. T. CHAT c’t crl.

ChineseSocietyfor Engineering
Thermophysics(CSEPT) and served as its vice President and Chairman of CSETP’s Heat and Mass Transfer Division in1978 and has been the Associate Editor-in-Chiefofthe Chinese Journal of Engineering Thermophysics
since 1979. He also founded the Chinese Solar Energy
Society (CSES) and served as its President and was
Editor-in-Chiefof the Chinese Journal ofSolar Energ)
during the period 1979-1987. He is currently CSES’
Honorary President. Professor Wang also establishedthe ThermophysicalProperties
Divisionof theChinese Society for Measurement(CSM), served as
its Chairman since 1983 and chaired the 1st and 2nd
National ThermophysicalProperties
Conferencein
1984 and 1987. He was for four years (1985- 1989) amember of the Thermophysicsand Energy Science
Review Panel of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and is currently the chairman of theTeaching Directory Committee of University Courses
on Thermal Science, a prestigious position appointed
by the State Education Commission.
Professor Wang
was the Associate Editor-in-Chiefof the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering and since 1990 its
Editor-in-Chief.
He currently serves on the editorial
boards of Science in China, Chinese Science Bulletin,
Chinese Journal qf’Chemical Industr,: and Engineering,and Journal of Astronautic Metrology cmd Meusurement. He has written eight textbooks,
one of which
Engineering Heat and Mass Tran$kr (Science Press,Beijing (1982)) won the National Outstanding
Textbook Prize in 1987.
Professor Wang has productivelyparticipatedininternational
activities in the broad field of thermaland science and technology since China opened herdoor to the West. In 1981, he inaugurated the China
Section of the International
Solar Energy Society(ISES). He was elected a member of the Executive
Committee of the International
Center for Heat andMass Transfer (ICHMT) in 1982 and again until 1987.
He chaired the International
Conference on Solar andWind Energy Applications in 1985. He was a delegate
to the Assembly for International
Heat Transfer Conference (IHTC) in 1986. Professor Wang founded theAsian Thermophysical
Properties
Congress in 1984
and chaired its 1st conference in Beijing in 1986 andits 2nd in Sapporo, Japan, m 1989. Hc was also thechairman of the 1st and 2nd International
Symposiumon Heat Transfer in 1985 and 1988, respectively, andedited the papers presented. The Symposium papers
were subsequetlypublished as Hemisphere’sseriesHeat Trawfer Science and Technolog_v for 1987 and1989. This year, he will chair the 3rd International
Symposium in Beijing and also the 5th International
Symposium on Transport
Phenomenon.
Since 1983,
Professor Wang has been an editor of this journal(IJHMT).
He is also a member of the editorial boardsof International Journal of’ Thermophysics and Drying
Technology. In the past decade, Professor Wang hasorganized a number of delegations to visit universities
andresearch
institutions
in Australia,
Japan.
Germany, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.
In recognition of Professor Wang’s professional accomplishments,
he was given the ‘Research Scholarship Award’ by the Japan Society for the Promotionof Science and the ‘Energy for Mankind Award’ by
the Global Energy Society, both in 1985. In 1989, hereceived the ‘DistinguishedContribution
Prize’ fromthe Japan Thermophysical
Properties Society and the‘Honorary Award’ from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was also the recipient of the ‘Honorary
Certificate for Long-TermDistinguished
Teaching’
from the State Education Commission
in 1990 andthe ‘Honorary Certificate for Pioneer Worker’ fromthe Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society in 1991.
On behalf of Professor Wang’s students, colleaguesand friends all over the world, and members of theeditorial boards of this journal, we wish him many
more years of happiness, good health and continued
success.
9. T. CHAO, U.S.A.
E. R. G. ECKERT. U.S.A.
Z. Y. Guo, China
E. HAHNE, Germany
J. P. HARTNETT, U.S.A.
S. Y. Ko, China
W. J. MINKOWYCZ, U.S.A.
I. TANASAWA,JapanK. T. YANC;, U.S.A.
S. M. YANG, China