Chair Professor Jen-Fin Lin, with frontier and innovative scientific achievement, from Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which has been viewed as one of the world’s leading professional associations for the advancement of technology. Professor Lin has served as the Director of the Center for Micro/Nano Science and Technology as well as chaired Institute of Nanotechnology and Microsystems Engineering.

Academician Michael M.C. Lai, the NCKU President, applauded Professor Lin’s outstanding academic achievement and contribution to NCKU in the field of mechanical engineering.

Founded in 1880, ASME is a 125,000-member professional organization focused on technical, educational and research issues of the worldwide engineering and technology community. “The Fellow Grade is the highest elected grade of membership within ASME, the attainment of which recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession," according to the ASME.

Professor Lin’s research interests mainly apply to tribology of ceramic materials, analyses in ball bearings and ball screws, microcontact models for rough surfaces and fractal theory, nanoindentation technologies and theoretical models developed for mechanical properties of various coating films and lump materials, frictional behavior and stick-slip motion at the atomic scale and multiscale mechanics and molecular dynamics.

Dr. Lin started his academic career at NCKU after he received his PhD from Columbia University in 1985. He has supervised 14 PhD and 97 MS students, and has authored about 200 academic papers, and holds seven patents.

Ever since 1986, he has published a series of papers with original academic contributions and various industrial applications. In the microcontacts study, the microcontact model expressed in terms of the fractal theory was successfully developed to solve the complex microcontact behavior of two rough surfaces. The greatest achievement is that the microcontact behavior was analyzed on the basis of variable fractal dimension and topothesy and non-Gaussian probability density function of asperity heights. These influential parameters were obtained from subtle analytical frameworks and numerical schemes. These accomplishments have been recognized as original and unique in this field, and are now being further applied to investigate the contact mechanism and adhesion force formed between fractal particles and a flat plate.

In the period of 1998 to 2003, a completely new method was developed to study the contact and tribological behavior arising at high – speed ball bearing. Some of these results have been further employed to develop the much more complicated kinematics exhibited in a double-row ball screw at a high rotational speed. An academia-industry collaboration with HIWIN Tech. Co. (上銀科技) for high-speed ball screw R&D is presently taking place.

For the past six years, new mechanical models have been successfully developed for the nanoindentation technologies applied in the brittle and ductile lump specimens and specimens with a variety of coating film and mechanical performances can be precisely evaluated or predicted by these models when incorporating these experimental results.

In recent years, Dr. Lin has also started to promote his research on the multiscale mechanics, which is the hybrid method of molecular dynamics and the mesh free method. This technology has been developed in a positive way for the purpose of evaluating the adhesion force arising in nano rolling printing technology ad investigating the evolution of atomic defects such as micro cracks/fractures arising at nanoindentations.

Ever since 2006, Dr. Lin has been the Director of the Center for Micro/Nano Science and Technology in NCKU. Four research teams have been founded and financially sponsored by the Center to engage in core projects in nanomechanics and nanomaterials, and nanotechnologies in optoelectronics, biomedicine and solar energy cell. Dr. Lin is in charge of the progress in the research about nanomechanics and nanomaterials and some high quality journal papers have been published recently. Apart from this, Dr. Lin is also in charge of the Nanotechnology Human Resource Cultivation Projects financially supported by Ministry of Education, which have been carried out in order to provide nano-scale research facilities with good quality and high performance to share with partner universities in the southern Taiwan, and which give many training course and workshops every year for researchers, graduate/undergraduate students, and industry. High praise from all sides has been given to the center each year.

ASME was founded in 1880 by a group of prominent mechanical engineers. ASME formed its research activities in 1909, in areas such as steam tables, the properties of gases, the properties of metals, the effect of temperature on strength of materials, fluid meters, orifice coefficients, etc. By 1930, fifty years after ASME was founded, the Society had grown to 20,000 members.

Today, ASME is a worldwide engineering society focused on technical, educational and research issues. It has 125,000 members and conducts one of the world’s largest technical publishing operations, holds some 30 technical conferences and 200 professional development courses each year, and sets many industrial and manufacturing standards.