Ernst Giencke

Ernst Giencke (born April 6, 1925 in Brudersdorf , Mecklenburg ; † June 19, 2007 in Berlin ) was a German aerospace engineer.

youth

Giencke was the son of a district forester and the oldest of three children. In Brudersdorf he first attended the one-class village school. The teacher and the Protestant pastor recognized the boy's talent and convinced the parents that the boy had to attend high school. At the age of ten, Giencke first went to high school in Malchin , and later to Wismar . At that time he was already on his own. In the spring of 1943 he passed the school leaving examination.

In 1943 Ernst Giencke was drafted first for labor service and later for military service and joined the Navy. He was spared direct missions at the front. However, shortly before the end of the war, he saw the advance of the Soviet army. At the end of the war he was briefly taken prisoner by the English; During this time he was used on a mine clearance boat.

Education

After his discharge in November 1946, Ernst Giencke was again largely on his own and went to an uncle who gave him a job as an intern in bridge construction at MAN Gustavsburg . In autumn 1947 he began studying civil engineering at the TH Darmstadt , where he continued to work as an intern at MAN Gustavsburg during the semester break. In April 1951 Giencke was accepted into the German National Academic Foundation and received a scholarship from then on. This enabled him to change to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, where he graduated as a graduate engineer in April 1953. After graduating, Giencke worked for two years as a structural engineer in steel bridge construction at MAN Gustavsburg. Cornelius worked there at the time , who designed orthotropic road slabs. In the comparatively short time of two years, Giencke developed methods for calculating such orthotropic road slabs. As a result of his two years of activity, his first publication on orthotropic records appeared in 1955.

Teaching and Research

In 1955 Giencke returned to Darmstadt and became an assistant and later senior assistant to Professor Günther Bock , who developed the aircraft construction department. Giencke's doctorate, however, was not in the field of aircraft construction, but tied in with his work at MAN Gustavsburg. The first reporter of the dissertation entitled “The calculation of continuous road slabs” was Professor Karl Marguerre (mechanics), the second reporter was Professor Kurt Klöppel (statics and steel construction). The overall verdict in the doctoral procedure on February 8, 1958 was “passed with distinction”. The work was published in three sequels in steel construction . It is reported by Marguerre that he was critical of the original length of the doctorate and asked Giencke to cut it. At the same time, Marguerre suggested submitting the parts that had fallen victim to the reduction as a habilitation thesis. The habilitation followed in the following year with the same reporters. The habilitation thesis with the topic “The calculation of hollow rib plates” was also published in steel construction . Giencke was thus a lecturer. During this time, Giencke set up a two-semester lecture on lightweight construction in which models and calculation methods for orthotropic structures took up a large part. It is overdue to summarize Giencke's work on orthotropic plates, which to this day have lost none of their importance. Giencke was mainly influenced by Marguerre. The theory of thin, slightly curved shells and the consistent use of the principle of virtual displacements and the principle of virtual forces by Marguerre influenced him strongly. In personal conversations, Giencke expressed that he saw Karl Marguerre as his most important teacher. In 1963 he was appointed to a chair for mechanics in Faculty V (mechanical engineering) of the TU Berlin , in which Reckling was also active. As early as 1964, Giencke received a call to Stuttgart. In 1966/67 Faculty V was reassigned, initially to the field of "Forming Technology", and shortly afterwards to the field of "Design Studies". When the departments were founded in 1970, Giencke decided, after consulting his employees, to switch to the Department of Transportation with the Institute for Design and to join the Institute for Aerospace. His main task in the aerospace industry was in the field of engineering calculations. From 1980 he also took on teaching duties in the field of flight mechanics. Giencke's work in teaching can be best described by the assessment of one of his students: "He had a huge talent for bringing the essential relationships in technical mechanics into a simplified form." Marguerre's influence was probably decisive for Giencke parallel to the development of the finite element method , tried to overcome the weaknesses of this method. A decisive weakness for Giencke was that extremely fine discretization and thus a very high computational effort were required in order to achieve results that could be used in construction for cutting forces or stresses. Giencke developed a multi-point difference method in which the simultaneous use of the principle of virtual displacements and the principle of virtual forces allowed displacements and forces to be determined with high accuracy. A disadvantage of Giencke's method was that it could only be used for simple boundaries let. Ernst Giencke supervised a number of doctorates in this area, but finally stopped working. In order to further develop the process so that it could compete with the conventional finite element method, a larger working group that would have worked for several years would have been necessary. Giencke did not want to take this route. Already at the end of the sixties of the last century, due to his commitment to training in the aerospace sector, Giencke dealt with the problem of sandwich structures and fiber composite materials. He was able to follow up on his work on orthotropic plates. The high point of this activity was a DGLR conference in Berlin on November 8th and 9th, 1984 on the “development and application of CFRP structures ” under his technical direction .

In 1990 Ernst Giencke left the TU as a full-time professor. He died on June 19, 2007 in Berlin. Quite a number of his students were or are active as university teachers. These include Andreas Kanarachos (aircraft construction and mechanics, TU Athens), Alfred Puck (construction technology, University of Kassel), Klaus Knothe (finite element methods and rail vehicle dynamics , TU Berlin), Robert Gasch (rotor dynamics and wind turbines, TU Berlin), Anthony Chang (Mechanics, USA) and Dietmar Klingbeil (operational stability and component safety, BAM Berlin). The wide range of subjects covered by his students shows that research in Ernst Giencke's environment offered broad development opportunities.

engagement

Privately, Giencke committed from 1970 to 1990 as head and evangelist of the New Apostolic Church in Berlin-Schöneberg

Individual evidence

1. ^ Knothe, Klaus: Ernst Giencke died. In: Stahlbau 76 (2007), Issue 8, pp. 600–601.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Giencke, E .: The basic equations for the orthotropic plate with eccentric stiffeners. Der Stahlbau 24 (1955), no. 6, pp. 128-129
3. ↑ JUNKERS engineers at IFA from A to Z. In: Flugzeug-lorenz.de. Lorenz airplane, accessed on May 31, 2018 . 
4. ^ Giencke, E .: The calculation of continuous road slabs. Der Stahlbau 27 (1955), no. 9, 11, 12. pp. 229-237, 291-298, 326-332. (abridged version of the dissertation)
5. ↑ Giencke, E .: The calculation of hollow rib plates (107 pages). Habilitation thesis (reporter: K. Marguerre, co-reporter: K. Klöppel. Habilitation day: February 19, 1959). TH Darmstadt, 1959
6. ^ Giencke, E .: The calculation of hollow rib plates. Der Stahlbau 29 (1960), H. 1, 2. pp. 1-11, 47-59
7. ↑ Marguerre, K .: Newer strength problems of the engineer. Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer 1950
8. ↑ Giencke, E. (Ed.): Development and application of CFRP structures . Symposium on November 8 and 9, 1984 in Berlin (TU). German Society for Aviation and Space travel. (Technical management: E. Giencke). Bonn: DGLR report 84/2, 1984
9. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium . Ernst & Sohn , Berlin 2018, pp. 613f., ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .
10. ↑ The death of Evangelist i. R. Giencke. New Apostolic Congregation (Berlin-Schöneberg), accessed on May 31, 2018 .