On 18th March, 2019, Dr Hu, the Withrop Professor of University of Western Australia visited the Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, and gave an impressive presentation about “A Simple Fracture Model For Concrete, Rock, Bone-like Bamboo Composite & Carbon Fiber Composites”.

At the beginning, Prof. Xinzheng Lu of Tsinghua University gave a brief introduction of Prof. Hu. Prof. Hu’s major research interests are fracture mechanics & advanced materials. He serves as Chief Investigator of 11 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grants since 1995. He has published over 200 technical papers and reports, and his H-indexes in Google Scholar, Scopus and ISI (Web of Science) are 43, 35 and 33, respectively.

Subsequently, Prof Hu started his presentation. Prof Hu introduced a simple closed- non-LEFM solution which contains only the fracture strength and composite structure measurement (aggregate size for concrete, grain size for rock and ceramics, layer thickness for carbon fibre composites. etc). Any university students and practical engineers can easily use the fracture strength model to analyse those aforementioned composite systems with common Excel Spreadsheets. He also compared the simplicity of his proposed model with some famous non-LEFM models in Civil Engineering for concrete-like materials for validating the advantages.

After the presentation, Prof. Hu further answered the questions from the audiences.