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China is the world’s largest automotive producer and has the world’s biggest automobile market. However, in the past decades, the development of China’s automotive industry has depended primarily on the foreign direct investment; domestic automakers have struggled in the lower ranks of car producers. In recent years, China’s automotive industry, supported by government policies, has been improving their Research and Development (R&D) capacity, to compete with their international peers. Against this background, China’s automotive industry requires a large number of R&D professionals who have not only a higher degree but also the applied and practical knowledge and skills of research. For the purpose of meeting the industry’s needs, a new Professional Automotive Engineering Masters Programme was launched in 2009, which aims to deliver the Masters to be the R&D professionals in the future.

The development of an analytical model for multilayer stack subjected to temperature change is demonstrated here. Thin continuous layers of materials bonded together deform as a plate due to their differing coefficients of thermal expansion upon subjecting the bonded materials to the change in temperature. Applications of such structures can be found in the electronics industry (the study of warpage issues in printed circuit boards) or in the aerospace industry as (the study of laminated thin sheets used as skin structures for load bearing members such as wings and fuselage). In automotive electronics, critical high-power packages (IGBT, Power FETs) include several layers of widely differing materials (aluminum, solder, copper, ceramics) subjected to wide temperature cyclic ranges. Modeling of such structures by using three-dimensional finite element methods is usually time consuming and may not exactly predict the inter-laminar strains.