Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Brunel Fellow
Academic Division: Energy, Fluids and Turbomachinery
Research group: Fluids
Email: yl742@eng.cam.ac.uk
Research interests
Yabin's research interest is in the broad area of fluid dynamics and flow control, particularly for tidal/wind turbines, turbomachinery and aerial/underwater vehicles. In particular, his ongoing research focuses controlling vortex-induced challenges, such as turbine wakes, cavitation and noise, especially in offshore renewable energy applications.
Strategic themes
Energy, transport and urban infrastructure
- Wind/tidal energy
- Fluid dynamics in tidal/wind turbines, turbomachinery and aerial/underwater vehicles.
- Flow control and bio-inspired design
- Fluid-structure interaction
- Tip (leakage) vortex
- Vortex-induced cavitation, wakes, noise
- Turbulence coherent structures and decomposition
Research projects
As PI or awardee, he has won more than £ 800k funding in total. He is holding the highly competitive and prestigious 1851 Brunel Fellowship (2023-2026), which only has one awardee annually. This fellowship granted by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 is set to give early career scientists and engineers of exceptional promise the opportunity to conduct a research project of their own instigation.
In addition, he has secured a Royal Society ISPF International Collaboration Award, an EPSRC Supergen ORE Hub Flexible Funding, an EPSRC IAA Innovation Award, and a Lund University 'Get Started Funding' in the past year, and he is closely collaborating with academics in the UK, EU, and Asia, including Oxford, Birmingham, Edinburgh, TU Delft, Lund, and Tykyo, and several leading green energy industry stakeholders.
Biography
Yabin obtained his doctoral degree from the Department of Energy and Power Engineering of Tsinghua University in 2021, with both the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis prize and the Beijing Outstanding Graduate prize. He studied at the University of Cambridge as a fully-sponsored visiting Ph.D. student for 1 year. His doctoral project was on spatial-temporal evolution and controlling methods of tip leakage vortex in turbomachinery. From Sept. 2021 to Aug. 2023, he worked as a research associate at the University of Edinburgh, on the EPSRC Morphing Blades project and explored gust mitigation through passive pitch and flexible trailing-edge within analytical analysis and fluid-structure interaction simulation. Afterwards, he started his independent research journey as the first 1851 Brunel Fellow at Edinburgh. In November 2024, he joined Cambridge as an 1851 Brunel Fellow and Principal Investigator (PI).
He has a distinguished peer-reviewed publication record, with 3 ESI Highly-Cited/Hot papers and an h-index of 15. He was honoured as a ScholarGPS Highly-Ranked Scholar (top 0.05%). He won many prestigious scholarships and prizes, including the HiWin Doctoral Dissertation Award, the most prestigious prize for PhD graduates in all Mechanical Engineering subjects across Mainland China, Taiwan, HK and Macao, and the Chung-Hua Wu Outstanding Graduate Prize, the highest domestic honour in this major with 9 students awarded in China. He was the winner of the Young Professionals Green Energy Awards and recently shortlisted as a finalist for the Scottish Green Energy Awards, the UK's largest celebration of the renewable energy industry to reward the next generation of leaders in renewables.
MSc (Research) and Visiting PhD students with relevant interests and expertise are welcome. Please feel free to reach out by email.
Department role and responsibilities