AKHUTIN

RUSSIA (see also List of Individuals)

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22.4.1892 Vitegra/RU - 20.4.1960 Moscow/RU

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Aleksandr Nikiforovich Akhutin became interested in civil engineering at age 21, when working from 1913 to 1915 for weirs and locks on the Sheksna River. He graduated in 1918 as a hydraulic engineer from the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic and for the following decade was involved in various civil engineering projects. Akhutin was in parallel a Lecturer of hydraulics at the Improvement Department of the Moscow Land Surveying Institute, and he became in 1923 a hydraulics Lecturer of the Moscow Transportation Engineering Institute. From 1924 to 1930 he was an assistant professor of hydraulics at the Bauman Higher Technical College, and he headed from 1930 to 1932 its Chair of Hydraulics. Finally, from 1932 to 1958, Akhutin was appointed head of the Chair of Hydraulics and Military Hydraulic Engineering of the Military Engineering Academy named after Kuybishev.

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Akhutin was a well known Soviet expert of hydraulics during the first decades of the 20th century. His book "Hydraulics" was a milestone in hydraulics, because it laid the foundation to hydraulics in the former Soviet Union as an independent branch in university education. He was further interested in weirs, spillways and applied his knowledge to the then important Soviet projects in hydropower engineering, notably the complexes of Sulak, Iori, on the Volga River and the Volga-Don Canal, one of the large waterways worldwide. During World War II, Akhutin was asked to design water barriers for strategic and defense purposes. He also published design books with type structures for immediate application in the field. Such books were also prepared in the United States, including those of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Waterways Experiment Station WES. Akhutin was involved in nearly 200 hydropower projects. He was awarded six Orders and five Medals from the Soviet State for his contributions.

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_{Akhutin, A.N. (1934). On free overfalls and spillways. Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitelstvo 4(5): 4-10 (in Russian).}

_{Akhutin, A.N. (1935). The shaft spillway. Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitelstvo 5(4): 19-28 (in Russian).}

_{Akhutin, A.N., Zheleznyakov, G.V. (1951). Hydraulics. VIA Press: Moskva (in Russian). Akhutin, A.N. (1978). 70th anniversary of the hydraulic engineering faculty at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitel'stvo 48(10): 56-58.}

_{Anonymous (1960). Aleksandr Nikiforovich Akhutin. Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitel'stvo 30(6): 61-62. P}