Ronald F. Scott

Ronald Fraser Scott (born April 9, 1929 in London - † August 16, 2005 ) was an American civil engineer specializing in geotechnical engineering .

Scott grew up in Perth (Scotland) and studied at the University of Glasgow , where he received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1951. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he received his doctorate in soil mechanics in 1955. He then worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers, where he worked on the problems of permafrost soils in Greenland , and in an engineering office in Toronto , before becoming an assistant professor at Caltech in 1958 . In 1987 he became a Hayman Professor there and in 1998 he retired.

Landslides, soil dynamics in earthquakes ( e.g. liquefaction ), marine geotechnics, mechanics of frozen and thawing soils. He developed geotechnical centrifuges that could also simulate the behavior of earthquakes.

He was an appraiser for the breach of the Baldwin Hills Dam in Los Angeles (1963) and the Bluebird Canyon landslide in Laguna Beach in 1978.

In the 1960s he was called in as a ground mechanics expert to clarify the then contentious question of whether the Apollo astronauts would sink into the ground when they land. He developed measuring instruments for the unmanned lunar probes Surveyor 3 and 7, which clarified this after their landing on the moon in 1967 to the effect that the lunar soil behaved more like moist sand, although there was of course neither water nor atmosphere and the grain sizes were actually very fine dust corresponded. Neil Armstrong , when he first stepped on the moon in 1969, said immediately after landing that he would sink in by only about an eighth of an inch or 0.3 cm, caused in part by the low gravity on the moon (Armstrong's weight with equipment corresponded to a weight of 29 kg the earth). With the depth, however, the strength quickly increased, so that the astronauts had problems pushing their flagpole deeper than 6 to 8 cm. Apollo 12 later landed near Surveyor 3 and brought Scott the shovel he was remotely controlling back to Earth, whereupon Scott regretted not having filled it the last time it was used. On the lunar landing program, he worked with engineers from Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Scott was also involved in the soil test equipment for the Viking probes on Mars in 1976.

In 1974 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering . He received the Huber Research Award and the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), received their Norman Medal and was their Terzaghi Lecturer in 1983 . In 1987 he was a Rankine Lecturer . He was married and had three sons.

Fonts

• Principles of Soil Mechanics , Addison-Wesley 1963
• with Jack Schoustra: Soil Mechanics and Engineering , McGraw Hill 1968
• Foundation Analysis , Prentice Hall 1981

Web links

• Obituary at Caltech