Fred Notzli

Fred A. Noetzli (born June 29, 1887 in Höngg ; † May 24, 1933 in Los Angeles ) was a Swiss hydraulic engineer .

Life

After attending school in Höngg , he went to the industrial school in Zurich and studied at the ETH Zurich , where he received his degree in civil engineering in 1911 . He worked in surveying and became Fritz Baeschlin's assistant at the chair for geodesy and topography at ETH Zurich, where he received his doctorate at the end of 1913. He planned in Italy and took over the lectures of Fritz Baeschlin in the summer semester of 1913. At the end of 1915 he emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Los Angeles in 1917. In 1918 he became an internationally recognized dam specialist. He carried out a study of the 1926 tentatively constructed arch barrier at Stevenson Creek in California at his suggestion .

Stevenson Creek Earth Dam

The Stevens Creek Dam is a dam with a height of 40 m and a length of 330 m. Its ridge is 169 m above sea level. (In 1985, the height of the dam was raised to 10 feet (3.0 m) by adding 177,000 m³ of material to its present height.) The measurement results were simulated on models at two universities.

He dealt more intensely with pier dams than with arch dams . He planned the Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains (California), the Coolidge Dam Globe Arizona , the Pleasant Valley Dam Arizona Owens River and the Presa Rodríguez in Mexico.

For his ideas in the field of dam construction, he was decorated in 1921 with a gold medal named after John James Robertson Croes by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which is awarded once every five years. ( Norman Medal )

A detached barrier wall, the round-headed pillar wall, with which the water load is aimed to pass through to the center of the pillar, is also referred to as the Noetzli wall , since this 1931 published the idea of ​​a shape that included the support line.

Publications

• Gravity and arch action in curved dams Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers , 1921.
• Improved Type of Multiple Arch Dam, Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 87th Volume, 1924 pages 342-413.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stevens Creek Dam is an earthen dam 132 ft high and 1080 ft long. Its crest is 554 ft above sea level. In 1985, the dam's height was raised 10 ft to its present height with the addition of 231000 cuyd of material. Santa Clara Valley Water District, Listing of Jurisdictional Dams in California, California Department of Water Resources 2017-07-03, [1]
2. ↑ Fred Nötzli: Fred Nötzli. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . August 6 , 2009 , accessed April 10, 2020 .
3. ↑ The James R. Croes' medal awarded to Mr. Noetzli, is next to the highest prize within the gift of the American Society of Civil Engineers, for papers contributing to engineering science, and in view of the fact that there was no award in 1921, The Mining Journal, an Industrial Review of the West and ... 1921 [2] , [3]
4. ^ Leopold Müller-Salzburg, Der Felsbau, Volume 2, Part A: Felsbau über Tage, Part 2, S. 843 ; District's consulting engineer, Fred Noetzli, who was a leading multiple arch theoretician; The basic type is the round-head buttress dam, originated by Noetzli 'in 1926;