Daniël Vandepitte

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Daniël Vandepitte (born May 29, 1922 in Poperinge , Belgium , † June 21, 2016 in Gent , Belgium) was a Belgian civil engineer and professor.

Life

After his school days in Poperinge and Kortrijk , Vandepitte studied from 1939 to 1944 at the University of Ghent (RUG), where he obtained the civil engineering diploma and assisted Gustave Magnel in his reinforced concrete laboratory at the RUG from March 1945 to November 1945. Afterwards, Vandepitte worked as an engineer for bridges and road construction for the Scheldt basin and then for the Ghent ring canal (1946–1956). During his time in the Belgian civil service, Vandepitte designed several prestressed concrete bridges , including self- anchored prestressed suspension bridges . In 1948/49 the Belgian American Educational Foundation sent him to Yale University , where Vanderpitte studied with Hardy Cross and obtained a Master of Engineering degree. In 1953 Vandepitte received his doctorate from the RUG with a dissertation supervised by Magnel on the load-bearing capacity of pile foundations . Three years later he took over the lectures on structural engineering from Magnel and was finally appointed professor at the Faculty of Applied Sciences in 1960 . Like no other, Vanderpitte shaped the research and teaching of structural engineering in Belgium. When two welded steel water towers collapsed in Belgium at the end of the 1960s, he investigated the stability behavior of imperfect truncated cone shells made of different materials in hundreds of model experiments ; this problem was to occupy him again and again later and bring it to the discussion as chairman of the Technical Committee 8 “ Structural stability ” of the ECCS (1987–1993). Vandpitte's main work, however, is his three-volume work, which deals with the entire structural analysis with a construction-oriented intention on 2100 printed pages.

Vandepitte's social commitment is exemplary: from 1963 to 1965 he headed the Royal Flemish Engineers Association. As rector of the RUG from 1969 to 1973, Vandepitte always had an open ear for the concerns of the protesting students in these years shaped by the student movement. In 1970 he became a member of the science class of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Fine Arts of Belgium and was in charge of the National Fund for Scientific Research (1970/1971). Without a doubt, a significant part of the high international reputation of structural engineering in Belgium goes back to the work of Vandepitte.

Works

  • Vandepitte, D .: 1979-1982. Berekening van Constructies: Bouwkunde en Civiele Techniek. Gent: Story-Scienta 1979-1982.
  • Vandepitte, D .: Confrontation of shell buckling research results with the collapse of a steel water tower. Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 1999, Vol. 49, pp. 303-314.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Daniël Vandepitte. In Memoriam, Belgium, June 25, 2016, accessed April 18, 2019 (Dutch).
  2. ↑ Vandepitte, Daniel (1922 to 2016). Ghent University, accessed April 18, 2019 (Dutch).
  3. ↑ testing of water tank model did buckles. Shellbuckling, accessed April 18, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Vandepitte, Daniël
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vandepitte, Daniël Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian civil engineer and professor
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Poperinge
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 2016
Place of death Ghent