Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 32
Prandtl
32.1 Life and Work
From Aeronautics Learning Laboratory:
• Ludwig Prandtl was born in Freising, Germany on 4 February 1875.
He was an engineer by training and was endowed with rare vision for
the understanding of physical phenomena, and the unusual ability to
put them into simple mathematical form. Prandtl was a most able researcher
and teacher, becoming professor of mechanics at the University
of Hanover in 1901. From 1904 to 1953 he served as professor of applied
mechanics at the University of Gottingen where he established a
school of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics that achieved world renown.
• Prandtls discovery, in 1904, of the boundary layer led to an understanding
of skin friction and drag and of the way in which streamlining reduces
wing drag. His initial work on wing theory, which followed similar
work by Frederick Lanchester but was carried out independently, elucidated
the process of flow over an airfoil of finite span and is known as
the Lanchester-Prandtl wing theory. Subsequently, Prandtl made decisive
advances in boundary layer and wing theories and his work became
the basic material of aerodynamics. He later contributed the Prandtl-
Glaubert rule for subsonic airflow to describe compressibility effects of
air at high speeds. Prandtl also made important advances in developing
theories of supersonic flow and turbulence.
• Prandtl gave modern wing theory its practical mathematical form. He
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