Liang Weiyan (; 2 October 1929 – 29 December 2018) was a Chinese

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and expert in power-generating equipment. He was one of the key engineers who designed the

water turbine A water turbine is a rotary machine that converts kinetic energy and potential energy of water into mechanical work. Water turbines were developed in the 19th century and were widely used for industrial power prior to electrical grids. Now, t ...

s of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest power station. He also served as Chief Engineer of Harbin Electric Machinery Company and taught at the

Harbin Institute of Technology Harbin Institute of Technology (; abbreviation: HIT or ) is a public research university and a member of China's elite C9 League and a member of the University Alliance of the Silk Road. HIT is a Chinese Ministry of Education Class A Doubl ...

. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1995.

Biography

Liang was born 2 October 1929 in Beiping (now

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast ...

. His ancestral home was Xiangling County,

Shanxi Shanxi (; ; formerly romanised as Shansi) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the North China region. The capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan, while its next most populated prefecture-lev ...

province. After graduating from the

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

department of

Peiyang University National Peiyang University (北洋大学堂), originally Imperial Tientsin University, was established in Tianjin in October 1895 by Sheng Xuanhuai, the official of the Tianjin Customs, with the approval of the Guangxu Emperor of Qing dynasty. I ...

(now Tianjin University) in 1951, he started his career at Harbin Electric Machinery Factory, eventually becoming Chief Engineer of the company. In the 1970s, his design of a 125-megawatt

generator for the

Gezhouba Dam The Gezhouba Dam or Gezhouba Water Control Project () on the Yangtze River is located in the western suburbs of Yichang, in central China's Hubei province. One of the largest run-of-the-river dams, it sits several kilometers upstream from downtow ...

won a national gold prize, and he oversaw the manufacture of China's first 600-megawatt

steam turbine A steam turbine is a machine that extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam and uses it to do mechanical work on a rotating output shaft. Its modern manifestation was invented by Charles Parsons in 1884. Fabrication of a modern steam turbin ...

generator using imported technology. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was a leading member of the group of engineers which designed the water turbines of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest power plant. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) in 1995, and was appointed in 2008 as head of the power equipment group of the CAE's Three Gorges quality inspection team. Liang was the chief editor of several books including ''History of China's Electric Industry (Hydropower Equipment Manufacturing)'' (中国电器工业发展史 (水力发电设备制造业)), and ''An English-Chinese Dictionary of Power Generation Engineering'' (英汉电站工程辞典). He also served as a Ph.D. advisor at the

. Liang retired in May 2015. He died on 29 December 2018 in

Sanya Sanya (; also spelled Samah) is the southernmost city on Hainan Island, and one of the four prefecture-level cities of Hainan Province in South China. According to the 2020 census, the total population of Sanya was 1,031,396 inhabitants, li ...

Hainan Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly l ...

Province, at the age of 89.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Liang, Weiyan 1929 births 2018 deaths Chinese electrical engineers Engineers from Beijing Members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Tianjin University alumni Academic staff of Harbin Institute of Technology