Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Adolf Busemann
Summary
Adolf Busemann (20 April 1901 – 3 November 1986) was a German aerospace engineer and influential Nazi-era pioneer in aerodynamics, specialising in supersonic airflows. He introduced the concept of swept wings and, after emigrating in 1947 to the United States under Operation Paperclip, invented the shockwave-free supersonic Busemann biplane.
Born in Lübeck, Germany, Busemann attended the Technical University of Braunschweig, receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1924.
The next year he was given the position of aeronautical research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute where he joined the famed team led by Ludwig Prandtl, including Theodore von Kármán, Max Munk and Jakob Ackeret. In 1930 he was promoted to professor at University of Göttingen. He held various positions within the German scientific community during this period, and during the war he was the director of the Braunschweig Laboratory, a famous research establishment.
Busemann discovered the benefits of the swept wing for aircraft at high speeds, presenting a paper on the topic at the Fifth Volta Conference in Rome on October 3, 1935, the very day of Italian invasion of Ethiopia which caused a delay of his talk. The paper concerned supersonic lift only. At the time of his proposal, flight much beyond 300 miles per hour had not been achieved and it was considered an academic curiosity (in fact, Busemann was initially planning to present a talk on supersonic wind tunnels, but had to swap topics with Jakob Ackeret because of the "sensitive developments" for the Luftwaffe). Nevertheless, he continued working with the concept, and by the end of the year had demonstrated similar benefits in the transonic region as well, after which the research topic was classified. As director of the Braunschweig labs, he started an experimental wind tunnel test series of the concept, and by 1942 had amassed a considerable amount of useful technical data. As the need for higher speed aircraft became pressing in Germany, the Messerschmitt Me P.1101 was developed to flight test these designs.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.