Tong Binggang

AWARDEE OF MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS PRIZE

TONG BINGGANG

Tong Binggang, professor of Mechanics in the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(GSCAS), is a fluiddynamicist. He was born in September, 1927 in Jiangsu Province. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in 1950 from the Department of ME, Nanjing University and then studied a graduate program of mechanics in the Harbin Institute of Technology(HIT), which was finished in 1953. Since 1953, he became director of the Theoretical Mechanics Division, HIT. He moved to the Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China since 1961, where he was the department head for several years and was promoted to a professor and Ph. D. supervisor in 1981. In the period of 1984-1985, he visited the University of Waterloo, University of Tennessee Space Institute, University of Arizona and CalTech. He became a professor in GSCAS since 1986 and was elected the academician of CAS in 1997.
For a long time he and his research group have got a series of creative scientific achievements in the fields of unsteady flow, vortex motion and swimming biofluiddynamics.
From 1970's he worked on the new approaches for predicting dynamic derivatives for wings and bodies of flying vehicles based on the unsteady flow theory. Novel flow models have been given to overcome nonlinear difficulties in transonic and hypersonic regimes, i.e. unsteady transonic locally-linearized panel method and unsteady hypersonic Newton-Busemann flow theory. A singular perturbation theory for 3-D unsteady nonlinear extreme curved-ground effect was proposed. In 1990's, new finite-element formulation for predicting the heating rate was established, which greatly reduced the uncertainty in the traditional method using the finite-difference prediction for the temperature gradient. The new integral approach much improves the heating rate prediction results.
In the late 1980's, Tong and his co-workers proposed first a 3-D flow model for undulately swimming fish and developed the 3-D waving plate theory, by which morphological adaptation for several swimming modes of fish was analyzed quantitatively and some new viewpoints were given. This theory has been successfully applied by W. Nachtigall Zoological Institute, Tim Pedley's group and Edwin DeMont's group as a powerful tool to solve various problems of energetics, muscle mechanics, global modeling, etc. in the field of biomechanics for fish swimming.
Besides, important advances on several topics of the vortex motion and the vortex method have been made, which include: (1) the stability and bifurcation analyses of wakes behind stationary and vibrating cylinders in a stream; (2) an analytical study on the flow structure for a compressible, viscous, and heat-conducting free vortex; (3) improvements of accuracy and adaptivity for 2-D vortex methods.
In the recent 15 years, Tong and his co-workers have published more than 70 papers and 3 books. He has won 8 ministerial awards for his work. Up to now, he has spent 50 years in teaching in universities, educated many students, and supervised 10 Ph. D. postgraduates.