Preface

Abstract

It is over one year since COVID-19 broke out. The whole world is still struggling against the virulent pandemic COVID-19. It is still difficult to take international travel. Many conferences are held virtually, for the sake of protecting all the participants and conference staff from get infected by the virus.It is uncertain when the COVID-19 will end, so it remains unclear for postponement time, while many scholars and researchers wanted to attend this long-waited conference and have academic exchanges with their peers. Therefore, in order to actively respond the call of the government, and meet author’s request, 2021 4th International Conference on Hydraulic, Civil Engineering and Automatics (HCEA 2021), which was planned to be held in Wuhan, China from March 26 to 28, 2021, was changed to be held on March 26, 2021 online through Zoom software. This approach not only avoids people gathering, but also meets their communication needs.HCEA 2021 is to bring together innovative academics and industrial experts in the field of hydraulic, civil engineering and automatics to a common forum. The primary goal of the conference is to promote research and developmental activities in hydraulic, civil engineering and automatics. And another goal is to promote scientific information interchange between researchers, developers, engineers, students, and practitioners working all around the world. An ideal platform for seeking global partners had been established.The conference brings together about 185 leading researchers, engineers and scientists in the domain of interest from different countries. The conference model was divided into two parts, including keynote presentations and online discussion. In the first part, each keynote speakers were allocated 30 minutes to present their talks via Zoom. After the keynote talks, all participants joined in a WeChat communication group to discuss more about the talks and presentations.We were greatly honor to have invited two distinguished experts as our keynote speakers. Assoc. Prof. Liqiang Jiang, from Central South University, was the first one to perform a thought-provoking speech: Seismic performance of mid-rise cold-formed steel structures. And then we had Assoc. Prof. Dr. MOHD HILTON BIN AHMAD, from Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia. He presented an insightful speech: Finite Element Modelling of Concrete Beam Strengthened with Fiber Reinforced Polymer Plate Subjected to Flexural Load. Their insightful speeches had triggered heated discussion in the second session of the conference. The WeChat discussion lasted for about 30 minutes. Every participant praised this conference for disseminating useful and insightful knowledge.We are glad to share with you that we received lots of submissions from the conference and we selected a bunch of high-quality papers and compiled them into the proceedings after rigorously reviewed them. These papers feature following topics but are not limited to: Hydraulic Engineering, Civil Engineering, Civil Automation and other relevant directions. All the papers have been through rigorous review and process to meet the requirements of International publication standard.We would like to thank the organization staff, the members of the program committees and reviewers. They have worked very hard in reviewing papers and making valuable suggestions for the authors to improve their work. We also would like to express our gratitude to the external reviewers, for providing extra help in the review process, and the authors for contributing their research result to the conference.Lastly, we would like to warmly thank all the authors who, with their presentations and papers, generously contributed to the lively exchange of scientific information that is so vital to the endurance of scientific conferences of this kind.Committee of HCEA 2021Committee member are available in the pdf