Joseph Bramah Medal awarded for 2016 and 2017

Two IMechE Joseph Bramah Medals were awarded at the Bath/ASME Symposium on Fluid Power and Motion Control, University of Bath, on the 13 September.

Professor Andrew Plummer and Professor Huayong Yang have been awarded the Joseph Bramah Medals for their outstanding achievement tending to advance the science of mechanical engineering, particularly in the field of hydraulic engineering.

The 2016 Bramah Medal was presented to Professor Andrew Plummer, Director of the Centre for Power Transmission and Motion Control, University of Bath.  The presentation was made by Professor Jan-Ove Palmberg of Linköping University (the 1997 Bramah Medal winner).

Andrew received his PhD degree from the University of Bath in 1991, for research in the field of adaptive control of electrohydraulic servosystems.  He then worked as a research engineer for Thales developing flight simulator motion systems before taking up a lecturing post at the University of Leeds.   From 1999 he was global control systems R&D manager for Instron.  Here he developed model-based control methods for high performance electrohydraulic test systthation tables, and both very high speed and high frequency materials testing machines.  He returned to Bath as Research Centre Director in 2006, since when he has keenly championed fluid power research and education, and has published 200 papers in the field.  He has also chaired the UK Automatic Control Council, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Mechatronics Group, and is a founding Director and now Chair of the Global Fluid Power Society.

^{2017 Joseph Bramah Medal winner, Professor Huayong Yang,}

The 2017 Bramah Medal was presented to Professor Huayong Yang, Director of the State Key Lab for Fluid Power Transmission and Control at Zhejiang University, China.  The presentation was made by Professor Andrew Plummer, University of Bath.

Huayong received his B.Sc. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in 1982 and Ph.D. degree from University of Bath in 1988. He has been with Zhejiang University since 1989, and was made a full professor in 1996.  As well as Director of the State Key Lab he also heads up the National Engineering Research Centre of Electrohydraulic Control.  Huayong has hundreds of publications and patents to his name, and several books, and is well known for running the pre-eminent fluid power conference in China at Zhejiang.  He has been particularly heralded for developing the hydraulic systems for china’s tunnel boring machines, an essential technology for a country which builds several hundred miles of subways every year, and now has subways in more than 30 cities.