SILBER

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

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21.3.1909 Paris/F - 27.7.1994 Grenoble/F

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Robert Silber started his career with the Ministry of Air as a scientific collaborator. In his PhD thesis of 1938, he investigated model airplanes with a single screw to measure the power with a double coupling. After World War II, he investigated ventilators and aeromotors, and was awarded in 1945 Prix Dupin by Académie des Sciences. Shortly later he moved to Grenoble University as a collaborator of Félix Esclangon (1905-1956), where Silber was in charge of the hydraulics laboratory. He was there appointed hydraulics professor in 1954 and retired in 1974. From then, Silber was active for war disabled.

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Silber is known for his work in backwater open channel flows, which were shortly later also considered by the American Ven Te Chow and who presented the Chow functions as a solution for almost arbitrary channel profiles. Before computers were available, backwater curves counted among the most tedious engineering calculations because a step procedure with long intermediate calculations was required. Backwater curves are an important issue in hydraulic structures and river engineering, mainly to predict the average flow features upstream of a hydraulic control. Today, these are basic problems solved numerically with standard computer programs. A particular difficulty in back-water computations arises close to so-called critical points where the flow undergoes either a change from subcritical to supercritical, or a change in the other direction. The standard hydraulic equations apply to flows with a hydrostatic pressure distribution but do not apply close to those critical points.

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_{Anonymous (1966). Robert Silber. Nouveau dictionnaire national des contemporains: 610-611. Paris. P}

_{Anonymous (1986). Robert Silber. Personnaltés de France: 552. Roissard: Grenoble. P}

_{Anonymous (2007). Robert Vladimir Jean Silber-Farb. Marie de Paris 05, Paris.}

_{Esclangon, F. (1955). Laboratoire d'hydraulique et d'aérodynamique de l'Université de Grenoble. Publications Scientifiques et Techniques du Ministère de l'Air 296: 3-7.}

_{Silber, R. (1938). Etude de l'adaptation et du fonctionnement de l'ensemble planeur-moteurpropulseur. Institut Aérotechnique de Saint-Cyr Publication 123. Gauthier-Villars:Paris. Silber, R. (1950). Etude des écoulements permanents graduellement variés en canaux découverts. La Houille Blanche 5(B): 662-673.}

_{Silber, R. (1954). Etude et tracé des écoulements permanents en canaux et rivières. Dunod: Paris.}

_{Silber, R. (1955). Méthode générale d'étude des écoulements permanents à surface libre.}

_{6 IAHR Congress La Haye D(6): 1-18.}