Wolfgang Liebe (engineer)

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Wolfgang Liebe (born June 22, 1911 in Gandersheim ; † October 21, 2005 in Berlin ) was a German aerospace engineer who was primarily concerned with the development of aerodynamic improvements in the stall behavior of wings .

biography

Wolfgang Liebe spent his youth in Cottbus , where he graduated from high school in 1930. For the choice of his future profession, impressions during an internship at Junkers as well as Chamberlin's landing at Cottbus airfield in 1928 and the frequent flyby of the Junkers F 13 were also decisive. He then studied aircraft construction in Gdansk and left the university in 1936 as a graduate engineer. His diploma thesis dealt with the calculation of lift on the wing .

At the German Research Institute for Aviation (DVL) he then worked in the field of development and collapse of lift on the wing and the tilting when pulling over . He carried out extensive tests with different aerodynamically effective attachments on the Messerschmitt Bf 109 , with the aim of avoiding an uncontrollable sudden stalling combined with a high risk of accidents. These attempts ultimately led him to the idea of ​​stopping the lateral flow away of the boundary layer and dead water by means of a simple sheet metal called a boundary layer fence . In 1938, Liebe was granted a patent with the number 700625.

From 1941 he was head of the flight technology division in the Czechoslovak Research Institute in Prague-Letňany ( VZLÚ ). In the first post-war period he worked for the Yugoslav government on the calculation of high-performance gliders. In 1951 he returned to Germany and received his doctorate in 1953 on the topic of causes and laws for tipping over on the fly .

In 1955, he received a teaching position for the subject of aerodynamics of the wing at the Technical University of Berlin, and in 1964 he moved to the Institute for Electrical Machines, where he continued teaching on the subject of heating electrical machines . After his retirement in 1976, he devoted himself entirely to his "hobby topics": vortex formation, propulsion through vortex repulsion, swimming and flying in nature. Together with his son Roland he developed the finite vortex model . For this he received the Medal of Honor of the Wessex Institute of Technology in June 2004 ("For outstanding contributions to aerodynamic science and technology").

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. On the theory of boundary layer fence (Engl.) ( Memento of 11 February 2006 at the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 41 kB)
  2. Patent DE700625 : Device for preventing the spread of flow disturbances on aircraft wings.
  3. On bionics