The University of Sheffield
Department of Mechanical Engineering

Professor Ning Qin

BSc, MEng, PhD, AFAIAA, FRAeS

Professor Ning Qin

Professor of Aerodynamics

Head of Thermofluids Group
MEng Course Tutor (Year 3 & 4)

Department of Mechanical Engineering
Sir Frederick Mappin Building
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
UK

Telephone: +44(0)114 222 7718
Fax: +44(0)114 222 7890

email : n.qin@sheffield.ac.uk

 Profile

With a PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Glasgow, Ning Qin started his Aerodynamics/CFD research career working as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow. He conducted research in the area of predicting hypersonic heating (in the HOTOL spaceplane programme), investigating Navier-Stokes methods for high speed flows, developing Newton-like implicit methods for CFD and parallel computing on the Daresbury's i860 Hypercube, an early national parallel computing system.

He moved to Cranfield University College of Aeronautics in 1994 and was appointed to the Chair of Computational Aerodynamics in 1999. At Cranfield, he established the Center for Computational Aerodynamics, with a wide range of funded research activities. 

In 2003, he was appointed to a Chair of Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the University of Sheffield, heading the Aerodynamics and Thermo-Fluids Group.

Professor Qin is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was awarded the RAeS Hafner Prize on VTOL Technology in 2000. He is an Associate Editor or on the editorial boards of a number of professional journals.

He is involved in a wide range of research and consultancy activities for Aerodynamic/CFD research and applications. He has published over 160 journal and conference papers in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamics. His recent research interests include: flow control, aerodynamic and multi-disciplinary optimization; micro-fluidic simulations; helicopter unsteady aerodynamics; supersonic and hypersonic vortical flows and interactions; transonic flutter boundary prediction, and algorithm development for turbulence simulation. He obtained research funding from research councils and industries including EPSRC, Leverhulme Trust, EU, DERA(QinetiQ), BAE Systems, Westland Helicopters Ltd, Airbus, Rolls Royce and Aircraft Research Associates.

Areas of Research

The Aerodynamics Research Group's interest is in the development and application of computational aerodynamic tools to a wide range of industrial problems in aerospace, automotive, and environmental industries. These advanced tools provide in-depth analyses and design optimisation for engineering products, such as aircraft wing drag reduction, racing car down force enhancement, and wind turbine blade efficiency improvement.

The aerodynamic analysis and design tools vary from very fast panel methods to popular commercial CFD packages, from the most advanced adjoint method for optimisation (adj-MERLIN) to the detached eddy simulation software (DGDES) for massively separated turbulent flows, developed within the group.

Current projects include: wake vortex aircraft interactions for aviation safety, shock control for drag reduction, control bump optimisation for transonic wing performance, dynamic grid DES for synthetic jets flow control, and adaptive meshing techniques. 

The Aerodynamics Research Group is equipped with a number of CFD pre- and post-processing packages for grid generation and flow visualisation, two Linux parallel computing clusters, and two low speed wind tunnels for experimental aerodynamic research and CFD validation.

Teaching

Selected Publications

Book Chapters

Selected Journal Papers