About Journal of Fluid Machinery

Journal of Fluid Machinery

Overview and identity

Journal of Fluid Machinery is a Chinese-language journal of fluid machinery engineering published in Hefei, Anhui Province. Its Chinese title is Liuti Jixie, and it carries the ISSN 1005-0329. It is published by the Hefei General Machinery Research Institute, China's national research institute for the general machinery industries — compressors, pumps, valves and refrigeration equipment among them. The journal was founded in the 1970s, and international bibliographic records of its articles, such as the Japanese JST records of Liuti Jixie articles carrying ISSN 1005-0329, document its continuous presence in the technical literature; a 2012 record, for example, shows the journal already at Volume 40, consistent with that 1970s origin.

The journal's subject, fluid machinery, is the family of machines that move, compress or extract energy from fluids: pumps, compressors, fans, blowers, turbines, valves and refrigeration machines. These machines are the unglamorous circulatory system of industry — they move water, air, gases and refrigerants through power stations, chemical plants, buildings, mines and water-supply systems — and their efficiency and reliability have outsized effects on national energy use. A specialist national journal for this field, published by the field's national research institute, is therefore a significant piece of Chinese engineering infrastructure, and the journal is recognised as a Chinese core journal indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD).

The Hefei institute

The Hefei General Machinery Research Institute is the journal's publisher and institutional anchor. As the national institute for general machinery, its remit covers the design, testing and standardisation of compressors, pumps, valves, refrigeration equipment and related machinery — the same product families the journal covers. The institute's history includes national work on valve and general-machinery standards carried out at Hefei from the 1960s and 1970s onward, placing it at the centre of the Chinese general-machinery industry's technical development during exactly the period when the journal was founded.

An institute-published journal of this kind serves two audiences at once. Inside the institute system, it circulates research results among the specialists who design and test China's fluid machinery. Outside it, it gives manufacturers, university researchers and plant engineers a common technical forum. That dual role explains the journal's character: its pages combine research on fluid dynamics and machine design with the practical engineering of machines that must be manufactured, sold, installed and maintained across Chinese industry.

Compressors, fans and pumps

The first group of machines in the journal's scope — compressors, fans and pumps — are the energy-consuming workhorses of the field. Compressors raise the pressure of air and process gases for industry, refrigeration and energy applications, and their design turns on aerodynamics, rotor dynamics, sealing and drive efficiency. Fans and blowers move air and gases for ventilation, combustion, cooling and process duties, where efficiency gains translate directly into reduced electricity consumption at national scale. Pumps move water and other liquids for supply, drainage, irrigation, power-plant and process service, and are among the most numerous machines in the industrial economy.

Research published across these three families shares a common technical core: the internal flow of the machine, the design of its impellers and passages, the prediction and suppression of losses, cavitation in pumps, surge and noise in compressors and fans, and the matching of machine characteristics to the systems they serve. By holding the three families in one journal under one Chinese title, Liuti Jixie lets methods developed for one machine — a flow-analysis technique, a seal design, a test method — be read and adapted by specialists in the others.

Valves, turbines and sealing

Valves and turbines extend the journal's scope to the control and energy-conversion ends of the field. Valves regulate, direct and shut off fluid flow in every piping system, and their design involves flow characteristics, sealing performance, actuation and reliability under pressure and temperature. Turbines — in this journal's context, the fluid machinery that extracts work from flowing fluids, alongside the wider rotating-machinery family — connect the journal to power generation and energy recovery. Sealing, which the journal names explicitly in its scope, is the cross-cutting technology on which all of these machines depend: shaft seals and gaskets determine leakage, efficiency, safety and maintenance intervals, and sealing failures are among the most common causes of fluid-machinery downtime.

The inclusion of sealing alongside whole machines is a mark of the journal's practical orientation. An institute journal serving manufacturers must care about the components and failure modes that determine whether a machine survives its service life, not only about peak aerodynamic performance. The same practicality appears in the journal's attention to testing, standards and reliability — the subjects through which institute research becomes industry practice.

Refrigeration and cryogenics

Refrigeration and cryogenic equipment form a distinct strand of the journal's scope, reflecting the Hefei institute's national role in refrigeration machinery. Refrigeration systems are fluid machinery in a closed loop — compressors, heat exchangers, expansion devices and controls moving a refrigerant to produce cooling for food storage, air conditioning, industrial processes and scientific applications. Cryogenics extends the same engineering to very low temperatures, where liquefied gases and specialised machinery serve energy, medical and research users.

Covering refrigeration within a fluid-machinery journal, rather than only in building-services or food-technology outlets, keeps the field's compressor and heat-transfer research connected to its largest application. Developments in compressor efficiency or refrigerant behaviour published in Liuti Jixie speak simultaneously to machinery manufacturers and to the refrigeration industry that buys their machines, and that connection is a deliberate consequence of the publisher's combined machinery-and-refrigeration remit.

Fluid dynamics as the scientific core

Underlying all of the machine coverage is fluid dynamics, which the journal names in its scope. The performance of every pump, compressor, fan and turbine is set by the flow through it, and the journal publishes the theoretical, computational and experimental fluid dynamics by which that flow is understood: internal flow analysis, computational fluid dynamics applied to machine passages, flow measurement, and the study of phenomena such as cavitation, rotating stall, surge and flow-induced vibration and noise.

This scientific core distinguishes the journal from a trade magazine for machinery manufacturers. Its articles are research contributions, recognised by the journal's standing in the Chinese core-journal system and its indexing in CSCD, China's citation database for leading scientific journals. At the same time, its fluid dynamics is machinery fluid dynamics — flow studied because a machine must be designed, improved or diagnosed — and that applied framing is what its Hefei institute readership expects.

Standing, indexing and readership

Journal of Fluid Machinery is a Chinese core journal and is indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), as its listings record. Core and CSCD status together place it among the recognised leading Chinese journals in its discipline: the core system identifies the journals Chinese institutions treat as their fields' principal outlets, and CSCD indexing integrates its articles into the national citation record used for research evaluation. International abstracting records, such as the JST records noted above, additionally make its contents discoverable outside China, though its working readership is the Chinese fluid-machinery community.

That readership includes researchers at the Hefei institute and peer institutes, university specialists in fluid machinery and fluid dynamics, design and test engineers at pump, compressor, fan, valve and refrigeration manufacturers, and engineers responsible for fluid systems in power, chemical, water and process industries. For them, the journal is the national forum in which Chinese fluid-machinery research is published in Chinese — the literature a design engineer in the industry is expected to know.

Distinctions: three journals not to confuse

This title is easily confused with two others, and the distinctions should be kept exact. First, it is not the Korean Journal of Fluid Machinery, which carries ISSN 1226-9883: that is a South Korean journal in the same field, whereas the Hefei journal is Liuti Jixie, ISSN 1005-0329, published in China in Chinese. Some international abbreviation services attach the English name Journal of Fluid Machinery to the Korean title's ISSN, which makes care with the ISSN essential; 1005-0329 identifies the Chinese journal. Second, it is not the Journal of Experiments in Fluid Mechanics (Shiyan Liuti Lixue, ISSN 1672-9897), a different Chinese journal published by the China Aerodynamics Research Society's research community and devoted to experimental fluid mechanics and aerodynamics rather than to machinery. Third, it is distinct from the general mechanical-engineering journals covered elsewhere in WorldNM's listings: its scope begins and ends with fluid machinery and its publisher is the Hefei specialist institute, not a general mechanical-engineering society or university.

Why the journal matters

Journal of Fluid Machinery matters because fluid machinery matters disproportionately to industrial energy use and reliability, and because China built a dedicated national institute — and, in the 1970s, its journal — to develop that field. Published in Hefei by the Hefei General Machinery Research Institute, covering compressors, fans, pumps, valves, turbines, refrigeration and cryogenic equipment, fluid dynamics and sealing, and holding Chinese core-journal and CSCD standing, Liuti Jixie (ISSN 1005-0329) is the journal of record for Chinese fluid-machinery engineering.

For international readers, it offers a window into a part of Chinese engineering that English-language journals rarely show: the machinery industries' own research culture, conducted in Chinese, anchored in a national institute, and concerned as much with seals, valves and test methods as with headline machines. Read with its identity kept clear — Hefei, Liuti Jixie, ISSN 1005-0329, not the Korean title of similar English name — it is an essential source for anyone studying China's pump, compressor, fan and refrigeration industries and the research system behind them.