Prof. Yangwei LIU is the Head of Department of Turbomachinery at Beihang University (BUAA), and he also serves as Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Nanchang Hangkong University.  

He is also the Exective Director of Beijing International Research Center of Turbomachinery. He was a visiting scholar in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge (2016.11-2017.10), and a visiting scholar in LMFA at Ecole Centrale de Lyon from (2010.11-2011.02). He is an Editorial Committee Member of the Journal of Hydrodynamics and Advances in Aerodynamics, and was an Editorial Committee Youth Member of the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics and Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica.  

He received his B.S. degree (Ranking 1 in 210 students) from BUAA in 2003 and Ph.D. degree from BUAA in 2009. Following two years post-doctoral research in BUAA, he became an Assistant Professor in 2011. Since 2012, he became an Associate Professor and then a Professor. He was awarded the National Leading Talent Support Program in 2025, the National Youth Talent Support Program in 2021, the Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project in 2013, “Future Scientists” Program of China Scholarship Council in 2015, Young Talent Program of Beihang University in 2017, and “Promising young teacher of Blue Sky” Program of Beihang University in 2011.

He has have worked as a Principal Investigator(PI) on about 40 projects, including 4 projects from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), 3 projects form the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China, 4 projects from the State Key Laboratory of Aerodynamics and National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Aero-Engine Aero-Thermodynamics, 2 projects form the National Science Foundation for Post-doctoral Scientists of China, and some projects from the Aero Engine Corporation of Chin (AECC) and other industries. 

He focuses on CFD, turbulence theory, turbulence modeling, rotor-stator interaction, and flow control in turbomachinery. He has published about 180 peer-reviewed papers and won about 40 invention patents. 

Recently he firstly proposed an innovative modification method for turbulence model based on velocity helicity to consider turbulence energy backscatter in vortical flows. The modified SA model (SA-Helicity) could predict complex flows more accurately. The SA-Helicity has been posted at NASA website (https://turbmodels.larc.nasa.gov/spalart.html) by Prof. Rumsey and Prof. Spalart (member of the National Academy of Engineering). It has been implemented into several famous CFD codes, including the fastest turbomachinery code Turbostream which is heavily based on the long line of codes from Prof. John Denton (FRS, FREng) at Whittle Lab at Cambridge University, the code AU3D developed at Imperial College London, and the Rolls-Royce proprietary CFD code Hydra. The results show that the modification method could successfully predict fan flows at off-design conditions.

Furthermore, a new hybrid RANS-LES strategy that modifies the turbulent viscosity equation based on the Kolmogorov energy spectrum, termed the grid-adaptive simulation (GAS) model, is proposed to achieve high accuracy using different grid resolutions. The results for more than 30 test cases predicted by the GAS-SST model using coarse meshes are usually much more in agreement with the high-fidelity data than those predicted by SAS-SST and DDES-SST models. The GAS model demonstrates the potential to address the accuracy and computational efficiency requirements for predicting turbulent flows.

For unsteady rotor-stator interaction, an exponentially decaying, deterministic correlation model is proposed to close the average-passage equation system. The model can provide significant improvements for predicting spanwise distributions of flow properties. For rotating stall, a computational model for compressor stall inception and its nonlinear evolution using unsteady RANS method based on a stall inception eigenvalue approach. The model provides a fast and reliable route to implement nonlinear simulation of compressor rotating stall. A passive control method using blade end slots is proposed; it can effectively suppress the corner separation and broaden the compressor effective operating range.

BTW, BUAA is a member of the prestigious Project 211 and Project 985 group of most elite Chinese public universities, and is highest research funding per capita in Chinese universities. As one of the two earliest departments, the School of Energy and Power Engineering has been broadening its research scopes in various potential fields.