- Adolf Busemann
Adolph Busemann (
20 April 1901 -3 November 1986 ) was a German aerospace engineer and influential early pioneer inaerodynamics , specialising in supersonic airflows. He introduced the concept ofswept wing s, and after immigrating to theUnited States was instrumental in the development of thearea rule and invented the shockwave freeBusemann's Biplane .Born in
Lübeck , Germany, Busemann attended the Carolo Wilhelmina Technical University in Braunschweig, receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1924. The next year he was given the position of aeronautical research scientist at theMax-Planck Institute where he joined the famed team lead byLudwig Prandtl , includingTheodore von Karman ,Max Munk andJakob Ackeret . In 1930 he was promoted to professor atGeorg-August University of Göttingen . He held various positions within the German scientific community during this period, and during the war he was the director of the Braunschweig Laboratory, a famous research establishment. [http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1384&page=64 Adolf Busemann, 1901-1986] , memorial by Robert Jones]Busemann originated the concept of swept winged aircraft, presenting a paper on the topic at the
Volta Conference in Rome in 1935. The paper concerned supersonic flow only. At the time of his proposal, flight much beyond 300 miles per hour had not been achieved, and it was considered an academic curiosity. Nevertheless he continued working with the concept, and by the end of the year had demonstrated the same effect happened in the transonic as well. As director of the Braunschweig labs, he started an experimentalwind tunnel test series of the concept, and by 1942 had amassed a considerable amount of useful technical data. As the need for higher speed aircraft became pressing in Germany, theMesserschmitt Me P.1101 was developed to flight test these designs.When
World War II ended, a team of American aerodynamists travelled to Germany as part ofOperation Lusty . The team included von Karman,Tsien Hsue-shen ,Hugh Dryden andGeorge Schairer fromBoeing . They reached the Braunschweig labs onMay 7 , where they found a mass of data on the swept wing concept. When they asked Busemann about it, "his face lit up" and he said, "Oh, you remember, I read a paper on it at the Volta Conference in 1935". Several members of the team did remember the presentation, but had completely forgotten the details in terms of what the presentation was actually about. Realizing its importance, Schairer immediately wrote to Boeing and told them to investigate the concept, leading to a re-modeling of theB-47 Stratojet with a swept wing. Busemann's work, along with similar work byRobert T. Jones in the US, led to a revolution in aircraft design.Near the end of the war, Busemann started studies of airflow around
delta wing s, leading to the development of his supersonic conical flow theory. This reduced the complexity of the airflow to aconformal mapping in the complex plane, and was used for some time in the industry.Busemann moved to the United States in 1947 and started work at
NACA 'sLangley Research Center . In 1951 he gave a talk where he described the fact that air at near supersonic speeds no longer varied in diameter with speed according toBernoulli's theorem but remained largely incompressible and acting as fixed diameter pipes, or as he put it, 'streampipes'. He jokingly referred to aerodynamicists as needing to become 'pipe fitters'. This talk lead to an attendee,Richard Whitcomb , to try to work out what these pipes were doing in a transonic test he was performing, inventing theWhitcomb area rule a few days later. [ [http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4219/Chapter5.html The Whitcomb Area Rule: NACA Aerodynamics Research and Innovation] ]At Langley he worked primarily on the problems of
sonic boom s, and spent a considerable amount of effort looking at ways to characterize them, and potentially eliminate them. He later inventedBusemann's Biplane , a supersonic design that emits noshock wave s and has nowave drag , although at the cost of having no lift. Busemann also did early work onmagneto-hydrodynamics in the 1920s, as well as his work on cylindrical focusing of shock waves and non-steady gas dynamics.Busemann's held a professorship at the University of Colorado from 1963 and suggested the use of ceramic tiles on the
space shuttle which were used. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE5D7103AF936A35752C1A960948260 Adolf Busemann, 85, Dead; Designer of the Swept Wing] ] He died at age 85 inBoulder, Colorado .References
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*worldcat id|id=lccn-n80-94414
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