Augustín Mrázik

Augustín Mrázik (born December 16, 1928 in Dolná Súča ; † August 23, 2011 in Bratislava ) was a Slovak civil engineer and engineering scientist .

Life

Mrázik, the son of a carpenter , studied civil engineering at the Slovak Technical University (STU) in Bratislava from 1949 to 1954 and was at the Institute for Construction and Architecture of the Slovak Academy of Sciences from 1954 . He received his doctorate in 1958 under Jozef Djubek (dissertation: Static solution for composite solid wall girders ). Together with Djubek, who studied in Leningrad and had good contacts with Soviet scientists in this field, he published recommendations for the design of steel structures according to the ultimate load theory in 1960 , and they also demonstrated in a further report the savings that can be achieved with design using this method. The ultimate load method ( plastic limit states) for the design in steel structures was first used in Czechoslovakia for an aircraft hangar. He gave a lecture with a co-author at a conference in 1964 about design using the ultimate load method, and it was also reflected in the Czechoslovak standards (1966, came into force in 1968).

At a Comecon conference in Timișoara in Romania , at which he took part in the Czechoslovak delegation with František Faltus and Adolf Chalupa, a standardization based on the load-bearing method could not prevail. The GDR opposed it because it wanted to keep its TGL standards as close as possible to the DIN standards, but it was partially adopted in the Soviet Union . Early on he used computers in his research and examined the steel quality of Czechoslovak production with statistical methods, which he found out that the domestic quality was not inferior to the foreign one.

He taught at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. His habilitation (doctoral degree according to the Eastern European system) took place in 1979. The habilitation thesis was on limit states and plasticity of steel structures, i.e. the load-bearing method.

Mrázik dealt with load-bearing theory (plastic design), load-bearing capacity of cross-sections with multiple internal forces, reliability theory , stability of deformations, cyclic loads and short-term fatigue (low cycle fatigue).

In 1988 he received the Aurel Stodola Gold Medal of the Slovak Academy of Sciences .

He was religious and therefore not a member of the Communist Party , which was a hindrance to his career (for example he was not allowed to travel to western countries to present his results). The publication of plastic design in book form was also relatively late. Another handicap was that he was deaf .

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 1035f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .

Fonts

• Reliability theory of steel structures (Slovak), Bratislava 1987
• with Miroslav Skaloud; Miroslav Tocháček: Plastic design of steel structures (Czech), 1980
  • English edition: Plastic design of steel structures, Ellis Horwood 1986 (also translated into Russian)