Adolf Busemann (20 April 1901 – 3 November 1986) was a German
aerospace engineer
Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is si ...
and influential
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
-era pioneer in
aerodynamics
Aerodynamics, from grc, ἀήρ ''aero'' (air) + grc, δυναμική (dynamics), is the study of the motion of air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dy ...
, specialising in supersonic airflows.
He introduced the concept of
swept wings and, after emigrating in 1947 to the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
under
Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War ...
, invented the shockwave-free supersonic
Busemann biplane.
Education and early life
Born in
Lübeck
Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the state ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, Busemann attended the
Technical University of Braunschweig
The Technische Universität Braunschweig (unofficially University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology), commonly referred to as TU Braunschweig, is the oldest ' (comparable to an institute of technology in the American system) in Germany. ...
, receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1924.
Career and research
The next year he was given the position of aeronautical research scientist at the
Max-Planck Institute
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...
where he joined the famed team led by
Ludwig Prandtl
Ludwig Prandtl (4 February 1875 – 15 August 1953) was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of ...
, including
Theodore von Kármán
Theodore von Kármán ( hu, ( szőllőskislaki) Kármán Tódor ; born Tivadar Mihály Kármán; 11 May 18816 May 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronaut ...
,
Max Munk and
Jakob Ackeret
Jakob Ackeret, FRAeS (17 March 1898 – 27 March 1981) was a Swiss aeronautical engineer. He is widely viewed as one of the foremost aeronautics experts of the 20th century.
Birth and education
Jakob Ackeret was born in 1898 in Switzerland. He ...
. In 1930 he was promoted to professor at
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
. 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.
[Adolf Busemann, 1901-1986]
memorial by Robert Jones
Busemann discovered the benefits of the
swept wing for aircraft at high speeds, presenting a paper on the topic at the
Volta Conference
The Volta Conference was the name given to each of the international conferences held in Italy by the Royal Academy of Science in Rome, and funded by the Alessandro Volta Foundation. In the interwar period, they covered a number of topics in sci ...
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 similar benefits in the
transonic
Transonic (or transsonic) flow is air flowing around an object at a speed that generates regions of both subsonic and supersonic airflow around that object. The exact range of speeds depends on the object's critical Mach number, but transoni ...
region as well.
[ As director of the Braunschweig labs, he started an experimental ]wind tunnel
Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft ...
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, the Messerschmitt Me P.1101 was developed to flight test these designs.
When World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
ended, a team of American aerodynamicists travelled to Germany as part of Operation Lusty
Operation LUSTY (LUftwaffe Secret TechnologY) was the United States Army Air Forces' effort to capture and evaluate German aeronautical technology during and after World War II.
Overview
During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces Intelligence ...
. The team included von Kármán, Tsien Hsue-shen
Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-Shen Tsien (; 11 December 1911 – 31 October 2009), was a Chinese mathematician, cyberneticist, aerospace engineer, and physicist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering ...
, Hugh Dryden and George S. Schairer from Boeing
The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and p ...
. They reached the Braunschweig labs on 7 May, 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 the ]B-47 Stratojet
The Boeing B-47 Stratojet (Boeing company designation Model 450) is a retired American long-range, six-engined, turbojet-powered strategic bomber designed to fly at high subsonic speed and at high altitude to avoid enemy interceptor aircraft. ...
with a swept wing. Busemann's work, along with similar work by Robert 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 wings, leading to the development of his supersonic conical flow theory. This reduced the complexity of the airflow to a conformal mapping
In mathematics, a conformal map is a function that locally preserves angles, but not necessarily lengths.
More formally, let U and V be open subsets of \mathbb^n. A function f:U\to V is called conformal (or angle-preserving) at a point u_0\in ...
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
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a United States federal agency founded on March 3, 1915, to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958, the agency was dissolved and its assets ...
's Langley 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 to Bernoulli's theorem
In fluid dynamics, Bernoulli's principle states that an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in static pressure or a decrease in the fluid's potential energy. The principle is named after the Swiss mathemat ...
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 led an attendee, Richard Whitcomb, to try and work out what these pipes were doing in a transonic test he was performing, inventing the Whitcomb area rule
The Whitcomb area rule, named after NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb and also called the transonic area rule, is a design procedure used to reduce an aircraft's drag at transonic speeds which occur between about Mach 0.75 and 1.2. For supersonic ...
a few days later.
At Langley, he worked primarily on the problems of sonic boom
A sonic boom is a sound associated with shock waves created when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms generate enormous amounts of sound energy, sounding similar to an explosion or a thunderclap to ...
s, and spent a considerable amount of effort looking at ways to characterize them, and potentially eliminate them. He later invented Busemann's Biplane, a supersonic design he originally proposed in 1936 that emits no shock wave
In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...
s and has no wave drag
In physics, mathematics, and related fields, a wave is a propagating dynamic disturbance (change from equilibrium) of one or more quantities. Waves can be periodic, in which case those quantities oscillate repeatedly about an equilibrium (r ...
, at the cost of having no lift. Busemann also did early work on magneto-hydrodynamics in the 1920s, as well as on cylindrical focusing of shock waves and non-steady gas dynamics.
Busemann held a professorship at the University of Colorado
The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University o ...
from 1963 and suggested the use of ceramic tiles on the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program ...
, which were adopted by NASA.Adolf Busemann, 85, Dead; Designer of the Swept Wing
/ref>
Awards and honors
He was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring
The Ludwig Prandtl Ring is the highest award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics), awarded "for outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering". The award is named ...
from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt
German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics (DGLR; german: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V.) is a German aerospace society. It was founded in 1912 under the name of ''Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für ...
(German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering" in 1966. He died at age 85 in Boulder, Colorado.
References
External links
Oral history interview transcript with Adolf Busemann in summer 1979, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
{{DEFAULTSORT:Busemann, Adolf
1901 births
1986 deaths
German aerospace engineers
Aerodynamicists
University of Colorado faculty
Technical University of Braunschweig alumni
German emigrants to the United States
People from Lübeck
Fluid dynamicists
Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring recipients
Operation Paperclip
Engineers from Schleswig-Holstein