Friedrich Bassler

Friedrich Bassler

Friedrich Bassler (born June 21, 1909 in Karlsruhe , † September 7, 1992 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German hydraulic engineer .

From 1961 to 1977 he was director of the Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management at the Technical University of Darmstadt . From 1964 to 1973 Bassler developed the hydro-solar energy project Qattara-Senke further. He headed the international Board of Advisers responsible for planning and financing and acted as an advisor to the Egyptian government.

Life

Friedrich Bassler had Alemannic-Swiss ancestors on his father's side and his family on his mother's side came from Neumark (now Polish). His father, Fritz Bassler, worked for the local newspaper, his mother, Elisabeth Bassler, was a housewife.

From 1927 he studied electrical engineering for two semesters at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, then civil engineering. After graduating in 1932, he was a research assistant. He completed the following legal traineeship in 1936 when he was appointed government master builder. After being called up for military service in the Air Force, he came to the Libyan Desert and the Qattara Depression as an officer under Rommel in 1941 and 1942 .

After being injured in the war and being imprisoned by the Americans, he returned to Karlsruhe in 1947, founded an engineering office there and one year later joined the Schluchseewerk AG in Freiburg as an engineer. For 12 years she was in charge of project planning and construction supervision work in the power plant and tunnel construction of this hydropower company, first as an authorized signatory and then as construction director. In the meantime, he also took on the role of operations director of this three-stage storage power plant in the Black Forest. During this time in Freiburg he married Janine Hoffmann (1951), his son Michael was born (1952) and his daughter Sibylle was born (1957).

academic career

A water management exploration expedition took him to Liberia . In 1956 he received his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin on the subject of "Considerations when choosing a dam design". In 1961 he was appointed professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he became the director of the institute for hydraulic engineering and water management at the newly established chair. In 1966 he founded the specialist journal " Darmstädter Wasserbau-Mitteilungen ". From 1967 to 1971 he was also the chairman of the planning commission, of which he was a member for six years.

In addition to his activities in the university sector and his numerous publications and reports, he has held several offices in research and business institutions - for example in the German Research Foundation . Guest professorships have taken him to Berlin, Madras / India, Alexandria and Cairo / Egypt, among others. In the project research sector, in addition to water management reports and model tests, it also found its way into technical and water management planning in water-rich and water-poor countries such as Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. For the OECD and the EC he prepared studies on the stocks and future needs of water.

In 1977 he retired. After that he was still active as an expert.

Qattara Depression Project

Since 1964 he has been involved in the “Qattara Project” in Egypt. By introducing Mediterranean water into a depression near El Alamein , a gigantic power station was supposed to generate more electricity than the Aswan Dam . Bassler headed the international “Board of Advisers” responsible for planning and financing and had been an advisor to the Egyptian government since 1975. He was commissioned by the Bonn Federal Ministry of Economics as part of technical development aid. His assignment was initially to write a first basic project study.

Bassler remained the engine that kept the Qattara project going for nearly a decade. The first “Bassler Study” from 1973 formed the basis for the final project study, the so-called “Feasibility Study”, which a German group of companies was commissioned by the Egyptian government to carry out in September 1975.

The project idea was: Mediterranean water should be let into the below sea level Qattara Depression through a canal or tunnel. The gradient should be used by turbines to generate electricity and the water should evaporate under the extreme solar radiation in the drainless depression.

In the mid-1970s, a team of around eighty, mostly German scientists and technicians, was planning the project: the world's first hydro-solar depression power plant, the Qattara Sink project. It was named after a roughly 15,000 square kilometer depression in the Western Desert (an area the size of the State of Hesse) whose lowest point is 130 meters below sea level and whose shortest distance to the Mediterranean Sea is almost 80 kilometers. A canal 60 meters deep was supposed to connect the Mediterranean Sea to the edge of the valley on the shortest route. This canal was supposed to be a water supply and waterway in one, with a fishing area and port at the confluence with the depression. The depression should be filled up to a height of 60 meters below sea level. A filling time of ten years was estimated for this. After this point in time, only as much water should be introduced into the drainless depression as evaporates from it.

The cycle of hydro-solar energy generation should have started with the flow of the Mediterranean water into the depression: During the filling period, the Qattara 1 power plant should produce around 670 megawatts; in the second phase it was to have a capacity of 1,200 megawatts and finally, together with a pumped storage plant , which was planned as Qattara 2 power plant, in the final stage it should have a total capacity of 6,800 megawatts. The artificial lake of the Qattara Depression would have been 12,000 square kilometers, 23 times the size of Lake Constance.

The core problem of the entire project development was how water should be fed to the sink. Calculations showed that dredging a canal or driving tunnels would be too expensive, a project with no economic benefit. Bassler decided to consider a technology that had not yet been used on this scale: the blasting of a canal with a nuclear explosive . 213 boreholes were to be filled with nuclear charges, each with an explosive effect of one to 1.5 megatons; each of these charges would have been fifty times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb .

Evacuation plans spoke of at least 25,000 people who had to be relocated. Another problem was the tectonically unstable Red Sea rift valley , only 450 km from the blasting area, on which the pressure waves from the blasting would not have been without effects. Also, salinization or even contamination of the (sweet) groundwater was feared. Fresh water runs below the Qattara Depression in different directions and forms the lifeline of the oases throughout the area. There was also the risk of new currents emerging in the Mediterranean , with erosion effects even on distant coasts - in addition to all of this, the old bombs and mines from the Second World War should have been removed before construction began . These reasons prompted those involved to give up the project, especially since the atom bomb idea had long since been abandoned for ecological reasons.

Works

• The energy sources river and sea water . Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management at the Technical University of Darmstadt, 1977
• "Hydraulic engineering communications of the TH Darmstadt" 1966–1979

literature

• Roland Börner: Friedrich Bassler 70 years: Speeches and essays on his retirement . Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management, Darmstadt 1979

Individual evidence

1. ^ History of the institute and the research institute for hydraulic engineering . Technical University of Darmstadt . Archived from the original on December 28, 2015. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 18, 2009.