Wu Zhonghua | |||||||||
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| 吴仲华 | |||||||||
 Wu and wife Li Minhua, c. 1943 | |||||||||
| Born | 27 July 1917 Shanghai, China | ||||||||
| Died | 19 September 1992 (aged 75) Beijing, China | ||||||||
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| Known for | General theory of three-dimensional flow for turbomachinery | ||||||||
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| Scientific career | |||||||||
| Fields | Engineering thermophysics | ||||||||
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| Chinese name | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 吳仲華 | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 吴仲华 | ||||||||
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Wu Zhonghua (Chinese: 吴仲华; 27 July 1917 – 19 September 1992), also known as Chung-Hua Wu,[1] was a Chinese physicist. He was a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) researcher, Tsinghua University professor, and Founding Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He pioneered the general theory of three-dimensional flow for turbomachinery, which has been widely used in aircraft engine designs. Wu and his wife Li Minhua were both academicians of the CAS.
Born in Shanghai, Wu's college education at Tsinghua University was interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War. He graduated from the temporary National Southwestern Associated University and was awarded a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. After earning his Ph.D., he joined the NACA, the predecessor of NASA, where he developed the theory of three-dimensional flow.
After the outbreak of the Korean War, Wu and his wife returned to China in 1954. He established China's first turbomachinery program at Tsinghua and developed a nonorthogonal curvilinear coordinate system to improve computational accuracy. After suffering setbacks during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, his research resumed in the 1970s. In 1980, he became the Founding Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the CAS.