WANTZEL

FRANCE (see also List of Individuals)

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5.6.1814 Paris/F - 21.5.1848 Paris/F

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Pierre-Laurent Wantzel is a person forgotten for a long time. His premature death at an age of only 34 years put an end to an individual who probably had be elected to the Académie des Sciences, as reported by his close friend Adhémar Barré de Saint-Venant (1797-1886).

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Wantzel was educated at Ecole Polytechnique first and then at Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, where his mathematical sense had already been developed. He was then appointed Lecturer of applied mechanics at the latter institution in 1844 and in parallel was a Lecturer in analysis at Ecole Polytechnique from 1838. His first paper dates from 1831. In the 1840s he collaborated with de Saint-Venant on supersonic jet flow from an orifice. In 1848, several papers on mathematical problems were posthumously published. Wantzel's bad luck was a concentration to the essential, he wanted to add to too many issues, and was poorly organized in work such that his health deteriorated. He ran into problems with his superiors and was dismissed from the Schools where he had taught.

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In total, Wantzel published over 20 works, three of which were written with Saint-Venant on the outflow of air from a high-pressure tank. By assuming adiabatic gas expansion, they were able to derive an outflow equation which remained unnoticed for a long time because the classical theorem of heat transfer had not yet been formulated. The results of their research were later important in the design of steam boilers. In contrast to the standard orifice formula, Saint-Venant and Wantzel included the effect of steam condition and the pressure difference between the tank and the atmosphere.

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_{Kretzschmer, F. (1926). Die Ausflussformel von de Saint-Venant und Wantzel. Zeitschrift des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure 70(29): 980-984; 70(47): 1595-1596; 71(28): 1007.}

_{Lapparent, A. de (1895). Wantzel. Ecole Polytechnique - Livre du Centenaire 1794-1894 1: 133-135. Gauthier-Villars: Paris.}

_{Saint-Venant, A. Barré de, Wantzel, L. (1839). Mémoire et expériences sur l'écoulement de l'air déterminé par des différences de pressions considérables. Journal de l'Ecole Polytechnique 27: 85-122.}

_{Saint-Venant, A. Barré de, Wantzel, L. (1843). Nouvelles expériences sur l'écoulement de l'air déterminé par des différences de pressions considérables. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris 17: 1140-1142; 21: 387-391; 21: 366-369.}

_{Saint-Venant, A. Barré de (1848). Wantzel. Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques 7: 321-331.}