Chien Ming Wang

Prof CM Wang’s research interests are wide; covering areas in structural stability, vibration, optimization, plates/shells, nano-structures, computational mechanics and large floating structures. He has made significant contributions to these areas by authoring over 500 journal papers, 6 books, editing 4 books and several conference proceedings. His publications have garnered over 26,000 citations and his h-index is 79 according to Google Scholar. He has been listed as a most cited researcher in civil engineering in the Shanghai Ranking for academic subjects 2016.

Prof Wang is globally renowned for his work on very large floating structures (VLFS) that find many applications such as floating oil storage facilities, bridges, restaurants, and piers/berths. He holds patents on a new type of pontoon, an offshore floating bunker supply base, a floating fuel storage facility and an aquaculture structure. Prof Wang co-edited the first book on VLFS and published extensively on the subject. He has been invited to give keynote lectures/courses on VLFS in more than a dozen countries. He is the principal investigator of several research and industrial projects on VLFS that amounts to over S$10 million. He was the chief consultant for the floating platform at Marina Bay and the floating wetlands at Punggol Waterways. His work on floating wetlands bagged the Minister of National Development R&D (Special Mention) Award 2017 and the IStructE Singapore Structural Award for Sustainability 2016. Prof Wang worked with NUS and SINTEF researchers to develop a new floating hydrocarbon storage facility and floating bridges for deployment in Singapore waters. He was awarded $688,000 from ARC to conduct research on a novel floating forest to protect fragile shorelines of Australia and another $433,000 to do research on the next generation offshore blue aquaculture. He is currently the leader of the offshore engineering and technology program of the Blue Economy CRC.

Prof Wang is also famous for his discovery of exact relationships between shear deformable beam/plate theories and their classical counterparts. His papers and seminal book on shear deformable beams/plates contain these amazing relationships that help unlock the exact solutions for shear deformable beams/plates. Another notable contribution of Prof Wang is the use of Eringen’s nonlocal theory for structural analysis that allows researchers to incorporate the effect of small length scale that is important when dealing with nanostructures. His early papers on the nonlocal beam theory have opened up a new research direction and spurred the publication of hundreds of papers on the subject. He has also contributed to the development of continuum models for carbon nanotubes, graphene and graphyne sheets. The study also involves calibrating the small length scale parameter in the nonlocal models by using Molecular Dynamic Simulations, experimental results and microstructured beam models or Hencky bar chain models.

Prof Wang's early research papers on flexural-torsional buckling of monosymmetric I-beams were cited in structural stability textbooks and his buckling formulas for these beams have been adopted in design codes. His proposed "Shooting-Optimization Technique" for solving two-point boundary value problems has been applied to solve all kinds of problems such as variable arc-length beam problems, biofilm problems, undersea cables, and fibre problems. His work on the automation of the Ritz method for plate analysis has drawn much interest from the research community. Many researchers have adopted the method for their plate analyses.

Professor Wang has supervised 28 PhD students, 20 MEng students and 12 Postdoc Fellows, many of them now holding leading positions in universities and engineering practice.