Dr. Yang has been working in the area of particle/powder science and technology in the past 12 years. He has developed an extensive expertise in the numerical modelling of particulate systems, and has made a number of significant contributions to this area. He developed an improved DEM model by including rolling friction and the van der Waals force into the model. For the first time in literatures, he reproduced the three-dimensional open-tree structures. He also proposed a quantitative index to link the interparticle cohesion with structure. He and his co-workers demonstrated that, contrary to what many researchers believe, the loosest state of mechanically stable random packings does not exist. The work was published in the prestigious journals Physical Review Letters. He was also a co-author of two other papers published in the same journal.

He has also been heavily involved in developing numerical models to simulate granular flow. He developed DEM models to simulate particles in a rotating drum, and applied the micromechanical analysis to flow structure at different flow regimes. His work highlighted the importance of interparticle collision in the breakage and granulation of particles. He later extended his work into the study of multi-phase flow using the combined DEM-CFD approach. His work on dry powder inhalers has also significantly improved our understanding of powder dispersion mechanisms.

Dr. Yang has published over 60 high quality, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, many of which were published in the internationally leading journals with high impact factors, including Physical Review Letters/E, J. Applied Physics, J. Colloid and Interface Science, AIChE J. etc. His work has been cited over 460 times with h-index of 12. He has attracted > $1m research funding from ARC, CSIRO and industries. He is currently supervising 1 postdoctoral fellow and 6 postgraduate students.