Erhard Schlechte

Erhard Schlechte, 1966

Railway bridge over the Elbe in Riesa

Erhard Schlechte, around 1969

Erhard Schlechte (born August 14, 1911 in Dresden , † August 11, 1979 in Leipzig ) was a German civil engineer and university professor .

Career

Erhard Schlechte was born as the son of an official in Dresden. From 1932 he studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Dresden . Then in 1938 he got a job in the private office of his professor Kurt Beyer , which was also linked to work on his doctorate . He received his doctorate in engineering two years later.

The employment in the engineering office Beyer included so-called war-important engineering tasks such as the supervision of bridge structures , mines and hydropower plants ; accordingly, his director Kurt Beyer was able to enable him to be exempted from military service.

During the bombing raids on Dresden on February 13, 1945, both his apartment and the Beyer engineering office were destroyed. He and his family took refuge in a village near Liebstadt . Two years later he returned to Dresden and resumed his work in the Beyer office.

Kurt Beyers' office was active in the reconstruction of the city from 1945 onwards, including the reconstruction of the historic Augustus Bridge . Before his death in 1952, Beyer had already handed over the technical management of his office to Erhard Schlechte, who remained the technical manager of the office until 1963. Under his leadership, the office continued building structural services in the specialist areas of the pre-war period and also expanded its range of tasks. The continuation of this private engineering office was a peculiarity under the circumstances of the GDR, as other private companies were expropriated during this time. Engineering work for the reconstruction of Dresden and on the conveyors of the brown coal mine had contributed to the survival of the office. At the end of the 1950s, the Beyer engineering office submitted a draft for the reconstruction of the Riesa railway bridge over the Elbe and was commissioned and responsible for the design phase.

Parallel to his work in the Dresden engineering office, Schlechte was appointed professor at the newly founded University of Construction Leipzig (HfB) - today the University of Technology, Business and Culture - in 1956 . In 1956 he became a full professor at the chair for steel construction and strength theory . During his activity as a professor, he worked on reports and research projects and was a building expert for the field of statics in the building industry as well as a licensed expert and test engineer for statics. In 1976 he retired .

Bad avoided party membership both during the Nazi era and in the GDR . He had been married to Maria Schüßler since July 1941; the marriage had three children: a son and two daughters.

Scientific focus

As a professor of steel construction and strength theory, Schlechte set up the Institute for Structural Engineering at the Leipzig University of Civil Engineering and was its director for many years. He primarily dealt with problems of stability theory and the theory of planar and spatial surface structures. In addition to expert reports, his most important practical work included the technical redesign of large open-cast mining equipment. But structural new developments that arose during the design of the Riesa railway bridge remained his most noticed innovation . The construction of the 101 m long steel tied arch bridge in the middle field and the assembly of the bridge, which initially allowed single-track operation on the bridge and was moved transversely after the old bridge was demolished, were new .

Schlechte also promoted and helped to shape new engineering areas such as lightweight metal construction and textile composite construction / air domes in their initial phases.

Among other things, he wrote the textbook strength theory for civil engineers , which was first published in 1967 and appeared in several edited editions until 1981. This textbook became an important textbook for civil engineers and was known beyond the borders of the GDR.

Church engagement

Erhard Schlechte grew up in an Evangelical Lutheran family. In the 1940s he became a member of the Evangelical Community (later the United Methodist Church , UMC), where he volunteered - for example as a parish council, lay preacher, member of the central conference and the central council of the church and as the church council of the UMC from 1972 to 1976 .

Awards

• Honored Technician of the People (1970s)

Works and writings (selection)

• The state of displacement of spatial frames with cyclic symmetry as the basis for the stress analysis. Diss. TH Dresden (printed by R. Noske, Borna-Leipzig) 1940.
• Large bucket chain excavator of the lignite mine. In: Construction machinery. Lectures of the building and metallurgy day 1956. Freiberg research books . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1956.
• The graphic representation of the degrees of slenderness of centrally pressed steel bars with an open, thin-walled cross-section, construction plan. In: Structural Engineering . Vol. 14, H. 9, 1960, pp. 418-423.
• The center of shear and buckling resistance for thin-walled bars. In: Wiss. Z. d. Hochbsch. f. Construction Leipzig. Vol. 9, H. 1, 1963, pp. 25-37.
• The torsion of thin-walled bars with shear deformation from obstructed cross-sectional warping, construction plan . In: Structural Engineering. Vol. 18, H. 10, 1964. pp. 502-507, H. 11, pp. 556-560.
• Riesa railway bridge. In: Scientific journal of the Technical University of Dresden. ISSN  0043-6925 Vol. 17, pp. 359-360, 1968.
• Graphical representation of the degrees of slenderness of the torsional torsional buckling, torsional buckling and flexural buckling of open bars that are pressed in the middle. In: Construction Catalog N 51–52. Institute for Lightweight Construction, Dresden 1973.
• Strength of materials for civil engineers. VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1967; 4th edited edition Bauverlag Wiesbaden, Berlin 1981.

literature

• Hans-Ehrenfried Goeben: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Erhard Schlechte 65 years. In: Scientific journal of the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences. 22nd vol., H. 3, 1976, pp. 129-130.
• Konrad Ehelebe, Ehler Fritzsche, Gottfried Hünersen: The steel construction specialist Prof. Dr.-Ing. E. Bad. In: Contributions to the history of technology and technical education: Series of publications for historical work results from all technical disciplines and related areas. University of Applied Sciences Leipzig, Center for the History of Technology ISSN  0943-0911 1st year, 1990, pp. 3–13.

Web links

Commons : Erhard Schlechte  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Erhard Schlechte in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Erhard Schlechte in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ^ University of Construction (HfB) Leipzig
2. ^ Anna Turre: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Erhard Schlechte. In: Marienbrunner CVs. Retrieved April 23, 2020 .