Wolfgang Zerna

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Wolfgang Zerna (born October 11, 1916 in Berlin ; † November 14, 2005 in Celle ) was a German civil engineer and mechanical engineer. He was professor for structural engineering in Hanover and Bochum.

Life

Zerna went to secondary school in Berlin and studied civil engineering at the TU Berlin with a diploma in 1940, before he was drafted into the armed forces. In Berlin he studied with Franz Dischinger , Friedrich Tölke , Ferdinand Schleicher and Arnold Agatz . In 1947 he was released from American captivity and went to Alf Pflüger as an assistant at the Technical University of Hanover . In 1947 he received his doctorate there ( on the membrane theory of general rotation shells ) and in 1948 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the fundamental equations of elasticity theory. In the same year he went to the University of Durham for a year as an exchange scholar and visiting professor to Albert E. Green , with whom a long-term cooperation began that finally led to her monograph on elasticity theory in 1954 (see below) - the book was then a standard reference for the treatment of elasticity theory based on tensor calculus . His contribution to the book was, in continuation of his habilitation thesis, among other things, a tensor theory of thin shells. After returning from England, he went to the construction industry at Polensky & Zöllner in Cologne and then to Philipp Holzmann in Frankfurt am Main, where he was responsible for prestressed concrete projects. At the same time he became associate professor in Hanover in 1950 and full professor for structural engineering in 1957 (especially for reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete). Since 1963 he was a member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society .

With his then colleague Hermann Flessner (now professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg) he played a pioneering role in the use of computers in civil engineering (both in static calculation and in metrology) in Germany - his institute was the first engineering research institute in Germany, which was equipped with its own modern digital computer (a Zuse Z22 ). From 1983 the first UNIX computer at the Ruhr University ran at his chair in Bochum (Fortune 32:16 under UNIX System III).

Since 1963 he was a member of the founding committee of the Ruhr University Bochum , where he became professor for civil engineering (structural engineering) in 1967. There he structured the faculty based on the English model and ensured, in particular, that theoretical, numerical and experimental work would work together. At the same time, he expanded his activities as a consulting engineer, appraiser and test engineer. His work on nuclear power plant constructions (the domes for the pressure vessels) and cooling tower constructions made of prestressed concrete were particularly influential. In 1983 he retired.

At times he was in charge of the civil engineering department at VDI . He was a founding member of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) and has been an honorary member since 1988.

The engineering office he founded in Bochum (from 1978 onwards as a GmbH) was run under the name ZERNA Ingenieure GmbH until 2012 and then became part of the three engineering companies ZPP Ingenieure AG, ZETCON Ingenieure GmbH and Höcker Project Managers GmbH, which operate across Germany.

Since 2014, the VDI-Gesellschaft Bauen und Gebäudetechnik has been awarding the Wolfgang Zerna Medal of Honor of the VDI in recognition of the outstanding and exemplary personality as an award for particularly deserving honorary employees or engineers who have made special merits in the field of civil engineering.

Wilfried Krätzig is one of his doctoral students .

Awards

Fonts

For his dissertation and habilitation see footnote

  • with Albert E. Green: Theoretical Elasticity , Clarendon Press, Oxford 1954, 2nd edition 1968
  • Contribution to the general shell bending theory , Ingenieur-Archiv, Volume 17, 1949, pp. 149-164
  • On the more recent development of the shell theory , concrete and reinforced concrete construction , Volume 48, 1953, pp. 88-89
  • with Heinrich Trost Rheological Description of the Material Concrete , Concrete and Reinforced Concrete Construction, Volume 62, 1967, pp. 165–170
  • Buckling investigations on hyperbolic rotation shells , Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1974
  • Criteria for optimizing the construction of large natural draft cooling towers with regard to stability, construction and economic efficiency , Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1978
  • with Friedhelm Stangenberg: Prestressed concrete girders: theory and calculation bases , Springer-Verlag , Berlin, 1987

literature

  • Karl-Eugen Kurrer The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 760f and p. 1084 (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .
  • Wilfried Krätzig, K. Roik, B. Kotulla (editor) Structural engineering in research and practice: Festschrift Wolfgang Zerna and Institute for Structural Engineering , Werner Verlag 1976
  • Krätzig, Hermann Schmidt-Schleicher, Friedhelm Stangenberg, obituary by Wolfgang Zerna in Stahlbau , Volume 75, 2006, pp. 177–178

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ingenieur-Archiv, Volume 17, 1949, pp. 223–232
  2. ^ Zerna basic equations of elasticity theory , Ingenieur-Archiv, Volume 18, 1950, pp. 211–220
  3. ↑ Fortune 32:16
  4. ↑ To the IASS homepage
  5. ^ The Wolfgang Zerna Medal of Honor from the VDI Department of Structural Engineering
personal data
SURNAME Zerna, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German civil engineer
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 2005
Place of death Celle