KÜCHEMANN

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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11.9.1911 Göttingen/D - 23.2.1976 Farnborough/UK

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Dietrich Küchemann studied at the Universities of Munich and Göttingen where he submitted a PhD thesis in 1936. He remained at Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt AVA until 1946. Then, he moved to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, to spend the rest of his life. He directed there from 1957 the Supersonic Division and from 1966 the Aerodynamics Department. From 1971 he was a chief scientific officer and in parallel an honorary professor at Imperial College, London. Küchemann was a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society from 1963 and he was made in 1964 a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Later, he was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics AIAA, among others.

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During his Göttingen years, Küchemann was interested in jet propulsion combined with jet machinery as a means of drive. His 1953 book written in collaboration with his life partner Johann Weber dated mainly of that time. The first decade of his Farnborough stay was devoted to the computational methods for arrow wings in the subsonic domain, as presented in his 1956 paper. He started with Prandtl's concept involving the effective and the induced angle of attack to predict the distribution of load on wings of large aspect ratio. Using additional information provided by Jones, the RAE Standard Method was introduced. Küchemann spent years for the development of the commercial supersonic airplane Concorde, where he was particularly interested in the vortex flow at the wing front. He presented in 1967 the 4th Reynolds-Prandtl-Lecture in Cologne.

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_{Anonymous (1968). Dr.rer.nat. Dietrich Küchemann. Jahrbuch DGLR: 407. P}

_{Haines, A.B. (1977). Computer und Windkanäle: Ergänzende Hilfen für den Flugzeugentwurf. Zeitschrift für Flugwissenschaften und Weltraumforschung 1(5): 321-337. P}

_{Küchemann, D. (1938). Störungsbewegungen in einer Gasströmung mit Grenzschicht. ZAMM}

_{18(4): 207-222.}

_{Küchemann, D., Weber, J. (1953). Aerodynamics of propulsion. McGraw-Hill: New York. Küchemann, D. (1962). Aircraft shapes and their aerodynamics for flight at supersonic speeds. Advances in aeronautical sciences 3: 221-252, T. von Karman, ed. Pergamon: Oxford. Küchemann, D. (1967). Entwicklungen in der Tragflügeltheorie. Jahrbuch WGLR: 11-22. Küchemann, D. (1977). The aerodynamic design of aircraft - An introduction. Pergamon Press: Oxford.}

_{Riegels, F.W. (1978). Dieter Küchemann. Jahrbuch DGLR (69): 27-29.}