Alfred Pugsley

Sir Alfred Grenville Pugsley (born May 13, 1903 in Wimbledon , † March 9, 1998 in Bristol ) was a British civil and aircraft engineer.

Pugsley studied at Battersea Polytechnic in London and then at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. From 1926 he was involved in the development of the R 101 airship at the Royal Airship Works in Cardington , where he learned that the carrying behavior is significantly influenced by high constant loads. From 1931 he was at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough and studied the dynamics of airplane wings. From 1941 he was head of the statics and mechanical engineering department (Structural and Mechanical Engineering). After the war he was professor of civil engineering at the University of Bristol and in 1968 he retired.

He developed the probabilistic safety concept in civil engineering, was an expert on metal fatigue in aircraft and dealt with the design of suspension bridges . 1952 to 1957 he was President of the Aeronautical Research Council.

In 1968 he investigated the partial collapse of the Ronan Point skyscraper in Newham (East London) with four deaths (Lord Hugh Griffiths was in charge of the investigation) as a result of a gas explosion in a stove shortly after the inauguration. The report exposed design flaws in precast construction and led to a revision of the building regulations.

In 1968 he received the gold medal of the Institution of Structural Engineers , of which he was president in 1957 and of which he received the James Alfred Ewing Medal in 1979. In 1952 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1956 he was ennobled. In 1944 he received an OBE .

Fonts

• Concepts of Safety in Structural Engineering, Journal ICE (Institution of Civil Engineers), 1951
• The Theory of Suspension Bridges, London: Arnold 1957
• The Safety of Structures, London: Arnold 1966
• The Engineering Climatology of Structural Accidents, Proc. Int. Conf. Structural Safety and Reliability, Washington DC 1969, pp. 335-340
• Statics in Engineering Hands, James Forrest Lecture 1978, Proc. ICE, Vol. 66, 1979, pp. 159-168
• as editor: The Works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Cambridge UP 1980
• The non-linear behavior of a suspended cable, Quarterly J. of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, Volume 36, 1983, pp. 157-162

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 1049 (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .