Sven Olof Asplund

Älfsborgsbron

Sven Olof Asplund (born June 16, 1902 in Skön near Sundsvall , † July 8, 1984 in Gothenburg ) was a Swedish civil engineer.

Asplund studied civil engineering at the Royal Technical University (KTH) in Stockholm and was in the USA from 1925 to 1931 as an engineer in bridge construction (Melan Arch Bridge Construction Comp., American Bridge Company , Robinson & Steinman in New York). After that he had an engineering office in Örebro , where he mainly planned small and medium-sized (sometimes temporary) suspension bridges for the many hydroelectric power plants in Norrland , but also residential and industrial buildings. In 1943 he received his doctorate at the KTH with a thesis on the application of Greenscher functions to the nonlinear problem of the bending theory of suspension bridges. From 1949 until his retirement in 1967 he was professor of bridge construction at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. In 1954 he took over the chair for structural engineering from the late Sven Hultin .

He made an outstanding contribution to formulating the formulas in structural engineering and implementing them on the computer. When the acquisition of a mainframe computer at the university was delayed, he bought one himself and was enthusiastic about the technology, which was then new in Sweden. Many of his students later worked as programmers. He had previously treated groups of stakes with the matrix method . In 1966 he published a monograph on the matrix method.

He was visiting professor in the USA several times.

One of his bridge projects is the Älvsborgsbron with a span of 418 m (opened in 1966). When it opened, he had already handed over his engineering office (Asplund) to seven of his employees.

Fonts

• On the Deflection Theory of suspension Bridges, Stockholm 1945
• Generalized Elastic Theory for Pile Groups, Proc. IABSE, Volume 16, Zurich 1956 (Eds. F. Stüssi, P. Lardy), pp. 1–22
• Column-Beams and suspension bridges analyzed by 'Green's matrix', Göteborg: Gumperts 1958
• An unified Analysis of indeterminate structures, Göteborg: Gumperts 1961
• Practical Calculation of suspension bridges, Göteborg: Gumperts 1963
• Structural Mechanics: classical and matrix methods, Prentice-Hall 1965

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 966 (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 ,

Web links

• Biography at the rowing club Göteborg (Swedish)