Walter Froede

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Walter G. Froede (born April 28, 1910 in Hamburg ; † March 2, 1984 ) was a German mechanical engineer .

Live and act

Froede attended secondary school up to high school and completed an apprenticeship at the Blohm & Voss shipyard. He then studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. From 1935 he was entrusted as a research assistant in the research institute for motor vehicles with development work on two-stroke engines, where he also dealt with the Kadenacy effect . In 1941 he wrote his dissertation “Constant-Time Controlled Gasoline Injection”.

Employed at NSU Motorenwerke in Neckarsulm as a specialist for injection technology and head of the test department, one of his first tasks was developing the sprocket . After the war he was briefly captured and then worked as a logging contractor until he was hired again at NSU in 1948 in the repair and maintenance department for American military vehicles. In 1950 he became head of the NSU racing department. With Heinz-Dieter Paschke (1923–2015) he further developed Helmut Droeschel's interrupter injection system.

In 1951, Felix Wankel also started at NSU, and Froede worked on its rotary piston engine (KKM) from then on. In 1953 he became head of the research department, in which, among others, the development of the Baumm'schen deck chair was carried out with Ewald Praxl . He also worked on the Rennmax . Together with Ernst Höppner from Emden, with whom he initially designed the Globus drawing aid , they completed the first KKM design in April 1954. The exact curve of the case was calculated by Prof. Othmar Baier from the Technical University of Stuttgart, who also designed a special grinding machine for production. Baumm's deck chair, powered by a 50 cc Quickly motor charged by an early Wankel blower, reached 196 km / h on the Utah salt flats in 1956. From then on, the Neckarsulm plant was joked about “Kraft durch Froede”. In the summer of 1958 he flew with Gerd Stieler von Heydekampf to the USA to the aircraft engine manufacturer Curtiss-Wright, from whom they stole 5 million for a KKM license. After this new engine was presented at the VDI conference in Munich at the beginning of 1960, NSU shares skyrocketed in the summer. Froede shaped the entire rotary piston engine development with regard to the selected construction principles, the variants and the possible uses. The Wankel boat drive quickly proved to be a flop. A large number of his ideas have been registered for patent. After his colleague Hans-Georg Wenderoth was withdrawn in 1969, Ferdinand Piëch stopped developing the Wankel in 1972. Most recently Froede worked on the 2x750 cm² engine. From the end of January 1975 he spent his retirement in Bad Rappenau .

He was married to Erna Froede (1913–2001). He is buried in the old Georgenhausen-Zeilhard cemetery in Reinheim .

Publications (selection)

  • with Ulrich Schmidt : Report on tests on two-stroke engines with gasoline injection ; 1938
  • Gasoline injection for small cylinders of gasoline engines ; ATZ 57; 1955
  • Type and current state of development of a trochoid rotary piston machine ; MTZ 1960
  • with Ernst Schmidt, Eugen Wilhelm Huber : Rotary piston machines as internal combustion engines ; 1960
  • Sports car with NSU Wankel engines ; ATZ 65 (1963) 253 to 256
  • Development work on rotary and rotary piston engines ; VDI-Z 1960, No. 8 p. 314
  • Single track vehicles with the lowest air resistance
  • with Georg Jungbluth : Development of the rotary piston engine using the example of the Wankel engine ; 1966

literature

  • The Engineer - Volume 208 (1959) - page 834
  • Road & Track - Volume 28 (1976) - page 89
  • The Motor Car - Volume 82 (1980) - page 304

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.ovbtrauer.de/Trauerbeispiel/HeinzDieter-Paschke
  2. ↑ http://www.deutsches-museum.de/bonn/sammlungen/tradition-vision/01/02/wankelmotor/zeichenhilfsgeraet-globus/
  3. ↑ ROTARY PISTON ENGINE: Big strip tease . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1959 ( online - 16 December 1959 ).
  4. ↑ INDUSTRY / NSU: fickleness - . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 1961 ( online - 26 July 1961 ).
  5. ↑ http://google.com/patents/US3323713?cl=ru
  6. ↑ http://grabsteine.genealogy.net/tomb.php?cem=683&tomb=379&b=F&lang=de
personal data
SURNAME Froede, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Froede, Walter G.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German machine builder
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1984