Max Michael Munk

Max Michael Munk, in his Langley office in 1926

Max Michael Munk (born October 22, 1890 in Hamburg , † 1986 ) was a German-American aeronautical engineer .

Life

He came from a lower middle class Jewish family and was supposed to be a rabbi. His uncle was Adolph Lewisohn (1849–1938). Munk was gifted in mathematics and natural sciences and studied at the Hanover Polytechnic School until 1914, where he obtained his engineering diploma in 1915. During this time he exchanged his first names.

After completing his intermediate diploma in 1912, he had applied to Ludwig Prandtl , whose employee and assistant (1916-18) he was now. He was exempt from military service in the First World War. On April 1, 1915, he received a one-year contract as an assistant at the Model Research Institute for Aerodynamics (MVA). Together with Albert Betz , he was Prandtl's closest research associate in the development of the flow profile theory. He was also responsible for the wind tunnel measurements. In 1916 he hired Erich Hückel . In the last months of the war he was at the seaplane test command in Warnemünde , where he felt uncomfortable without a doctorate. When he submitted some of his Göttingen thesis as a dissertation to his professor in Hanover, he received no reply. Prandtl consoled him that it would take longer in Hanover and offered to accept a refurbished version of his work in Göttingen as a doctoral thesis. Prandtl criticized the Göttingen version with the title Isoperimetric Problem as being so short that it was hardly understandable. Prandtl also asked if he would just like to call her Über Flügel with minimal resistance . In the end he received two dissertations, one from Hanover and one in May 1918 from Göttingen. Shortly afterwards it became known as Prandtl's flow profile theory and explained such fundamental phenomena as induced air resistance . He put forward the thesis that this resistance is minimal if the downdraft speed is the same at all points. Although they were previously known to Prandtl and his circle, they had not previously been processed on such a mathematical basis. Munk also proved that the resistance of parallel wings (as with the biplane) does not depend on the offset of the wings in the direction of flight ( stagger theorem , staggering theorem). When Prandtl presented it to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in July, he praised Munk's dissertation and presented a simplified derivation.

The discovery was immediately taken up by Anton Herman Gerard Fokker and related to the Fokker Dr.I. Otherwise it was ignored by aircraft designers during the First World War.

When Prandtl's funds were cut after the war, Munk worked briefly at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin , where he designed a small wind tunnel for testing models.

He wanted to emigrate to the USA. After Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (1886–1984) had visited Göttingen in July 1920, he was able to persuade Joseph Sweetman Ames (1864–1943) to employ Munk at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), where Munk worked for the next six years in the NACA Headquarters in Washington worked.

Already at Zeppelin he realized that by using compressed air in the wind tunnel he could work with smaller models or with lower wind speeds, which now led to the Variable Density Tunnel (VDT) (see Reynolds number ). When another technician presented something similar (Vladimir Margoulis, a former employee of Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky , had suggested carbon dioxide as the medium), Munk accused him of being a thief.

Although he produced 40 fonts during this time, the relationship with the other technicians was described as tense to devastating due to his arrogance. This caused problems when he oversaw the construction of the Langley wind tunnel in 1921.

After he was named chief aeronautical engineer at the Langley Research Center in January 1926 by NACA research director George W. Lewis (1882-1948) , there was a revolt for the next three years. In early 1927 the others stopped working in protest.

He quit NACA in 1927 and then worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, where he tried to solve a cooling problem with electric motors. He then worked for a year at American Brown Boveri Electric Corporation in Camden, New Jersey and another year at the small Alexander Airplane Company in Colorado. From 1930 he wrote pathetic letters in which he presented himself as a leading aerodynamicist. During the Great Depression , he was the consulting editor for Aero Digest . For a time he taught mechanical engineering at the Catholic University of America in Washington. In 1937 his cousin Hilde Munk, who was married to Will Burtin , asked him for support in the USA. Burtin designed the Flex-O-prop logo for the Munk Aeronautical Laboratory in Brentwood, Maryland.

After his multiple offers to return to work for the NACA were all turned down, he turned to Vannevar Bush in May 1940 .

In 1924 Munk had incidentally stated: "recently made a theoretical analysis which indicates that a V-shaped wing traveling point foremost would be less affected by compressibility". In 1945 Robert Thomas Jones introduced the swept wing concept to the NACA.

From 1945 Munk researched turbulent currents as a physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory . From 1958 until his retirement in 1961 he worked again for the Catholic University. He then moved to Rehoboth Beach , Delaware, where he lived in a mobile home near his closest relatives and was recovering from eye surgery.

In 1977 he published Congruence surds and Fermat's last theorem . In August 1985, he donated his collection of engineering books to the Langley Historical Archive .

See also: NACA profiles

Publications

• Isoperimetric tasks from the theory of flight ; Göttingen, dissertation 1918; 1919
• Contribution to the aerodynamics of the aircraft support structures ; 1919
• About propellers driven by the wind ; In: Zeitschrift für Flugtechnik und Motorluftschiffahrt ; 1920, pp. 220-223
• On a New Type of Wind Tunnel ; NACA TN 60, June 1921
• Tail plane: in four parts ; Washington, DC: Gov. Print. Off., 1922
• General biplane theory: in four parts ; 1922
• The analysis of free flight propeller tests and its application to design ; around 1923
• The aerodynamic forces on airship hulls ; 1923
• Analysis of FW Durand's and EP Lesley's propeller tests ; 1923
• General Theory of Windmills ; 1923
• Aerodynamic Forces on Airship Hulls ; TR 184, 1924
• Aerodynamics of Airships
• Note on the Relative Effect of the Dihedral and the Sweep Back of Airplane Wings ; TN 177, 1924
• Preliminary wing model tests in the variable density wind tunnel of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ; around 1925
• Model tests with a systematic series of 27 wing sections at full Reynolds number ; TR 221; around 1925; with Elton W. Miller
• The air forces on a model of the Sperry Messenger airplane without propeller ; around 1925
• The variable density wind tunnel of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ; 1925
• The aerodynamic characteristics of seven frequently used wing sections at full Reynolds number ; around 1925
• The air forces on a systematic series of biplane and triplane cellule models ; around 1926
• Influence of Obstacles on the Lift of Airfoils ; 1930
• Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics for Aircraft Designers
• On the multiplicity of steady gas flows having the same streamline pattern ; with RC Prim; Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (May 1947)
• My Early Aerodynamic Research - Thoughts and Memories . In: Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics . 13, 1981, pp. 1-8, doi : 10.1146 / annurev.fl.13.010181.000245 .

literature

• John D. Anderson Jr .: A History of Aerodynamics and its Impact on Flying Machines ; Cambridge, 1997, pp. 289-292
• Mark Levinson, Airfoil Profiles: Eyeballing, Design, and Selection, 1880-1922 ; 1985, pp. 28-29
• Interviews with Max M. Munk, Ocean City, Md., April 1-4, 1982

Individual evidence

1. ^ A history of aerodynamics and its impact on flying machines by John David Anderson
2. ↑ Michael Eckert: The dawn of fluid dynamics: a discipline between science and technology ; P. 73f
3. ↑ http://www.ahnenreich.de/retrospect/juden/index.php?m=family&id=I117413&PHPSESSID=6e186436a50a24e2a647109ea5630981
4. ↑ http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4305/ch3.htm
5. ↑ http://www.aleph99.org/etusci/ks/t1a4.htm
6. ↑ http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1990.htm
7. ↑ http://www.aircrash.org/burnelli/munk_bio.htm
8. ↑ http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/search.jsp?N=4294756456&Ns=HarvestDate%7C1
9. ↑ http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4305/ch4.htm
10. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
11. ↑ Popular Science Jan. 1952
12. ↑ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11429&page=240
13. ↑ http://www.akl.tu-darmstadt.de/media/arbeitskreis_luftverkehr/downloads_6/kolloquien/9kolloqium/heinzerlingflgelpfeilundflchenregel.pdf