Karl Klotter

Karl Klotter (born December 28, 1901 in Karlsruhe ; † September 20, 1984 ibid) was a German engineer and civil engineer.

Life

Klotter went to secondary school in Karlsruhe and studied electrical engineering at the TH Karlsruhe with the preliminary diploma in 1922, after which he worked for a year at Osram in Weißwasser . At the end of 1923 he continued his studies in Karlsruhe and Berlin, where he mainly studied mathematics and physics with a physics diploma in 1925. Then he went to England as an engineer for a year and was then a year at Osram in their new plant in Siemensstadt in Berlin. In 1928 he became the assistant to Theodor Pöschl at the TH Karlsruhe and received his doctorate there in 1929 ( on the settling numbers of the elastic transverse vibrations of a flat, circular, loaded plate ) and in 1931 he completed his habilitation ( The transverse vibrations of elastically embedded strings, rods, membranes and plates: a Contribution to the theory of the vibrations of elastically restrained systems ). After that he was a private lecturer, but gave up his assistantship in 1935 to write his textbook on vibration theory. Since he was not a member of the NSDAP, he was passed over in several appeal procedures despite his qualifications and in 1938 he went to the German Aviation Research Institute in Berlin-Adlershof. In 1940 he became head of department with the rank of extraordinary professor at the TH Berlin (Institute for Vibration Research).

In 1946 he became a full professor for vibration theory and machine dynamics at the TU Berlin, but in the same year he went to the TH Karlsruhe as professor for mathematics and in 1948 he became director of the newly founded Institute for Vibration Technology. In 1949 he was visiting professor at Stanford University and decided to succeed Nicolas Minorsky at Stanford in 1951 , after Pöschl postponed his retirement for two years (Klotter actually wanted to succeed him as professor of mechanics). In 1959 he became professor for applied mechanics and technical vibration theory at the TH Darmstadt , where he retired in 1969.

He was a co-founder of the VDI specialist group vibration technology and was significantly involved in the guidelines of the group. In 1983 he received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Braunschweig . For many years he was co-editor of the magazine for applied mathematics and mechanics (ZAMM).

Fonts

• Introduction to Technical Vibration Theory, Springer 1938, 2nd edition in two volumes 1951, 1960, 3rd completely revised edition from 1978 onwards (Volume 1 simple oscillators, part 1A linear oscillations, part 1B nonlinear oscillations, volume 2 oscillators with several degrees of freedom)
• Measurement of mechanical vibrations, Springer 1943

He also wrote the section on vibration theory in the engineering manual for the hut .

literature

• August Ludwig Degener, Walter Habel: Who is who? The German Who's Who. Vol. 16. Arani, Berlin 1970 ISBN 3-7605-2007-3 p. 642.
• Jörg Wauer: Mechanics and its specialist representatives at the University of Karlsruhe. KIT Science Publ., 2017, p. 87 f.