PETERS

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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29.11.1901 Essen-Borbeck/D - 5.2.1982 Bergisch-Gladbach/D

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Heinrich Peters graduated in 1926 from Darmstadt Technical University and submitted a PhD thesis to the Technical University of Munich in 1930. From 1926, he had been a research assistant to Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953) at Göttingen University. He moved in 1931 to the USA as an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He returned to Germany in 1940 as director of the Luftfahrt-Forschungsanstalt in Munich. After World War II Peters joined the Office National d'Etudes et Recherches Aéronautiques ONERA in Paris. He was appointed professor of aviation at Instituto Tecnologico Aeronautica Sao José dos Campos ITA, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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Peters' first contribution to hydrodynamics was his chapter on pressure measurement in the 1931 Handbook. The chapter includes the following topics: Static, dynamic and total pressure readings, calibration of instrumentation, and manometers for pressure tests. He had extensively used this instrumentation when doing observations during his PhD thesis on the energy conversion across diffusers. Once in the USA, he was interested in the physics of turbulence and presented a significant paper in 1937. Peters was a participant of the 4th IUTAM Congress in Cambridge UK, and of the 5th IUTAM Congress held in Cambridge, Mass. When going through the list of participants, one finds about everybody whose name has later come to fame, except for the researchers from the East-European countries.

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_{Anonymous (1956). Das Centro Tecnico von San José dos Campos. Interavia 11(2): 112-114. P}

_{Peters, H. (1931). Druckmessung. Handbuch der Experimentalphysik 4: Hydro- und Aerodynamik 1: 487-510, L. Schiller, ed. Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft: Leipzig.}

_{Peters, H. (1931). Energieumsetzung in Querschnittserweiterungen bei verschiedenen Zulaufbedingungen. Ingenieur-Archiv 2: 92-107.}

_{Peters, H. (1935). On the separation of turbulent boundary layers. 4 IUTAM Congress}

_{Cambridge UK: 234.}

_{Peters, H., Reissner, E. (1937). A contribution to the theory of turbulence. Journal Aeronautical Sciences 4(9): 384-385.}

_{Peters, H. (1938). A study in boundary layers. 5 IUTAM Congress Cambridge MA: 393-395. Poggendorff, J.C. (1953). Peters, Heinrich. Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch 7a: 535; 8: 2002. Akademie-Verlag: Berlin, with bibliography. http://www.iutam.net/iutam/History/1934.php H. Peters. P}