POPA

ROMANIA (see also List of Individuals)

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22.2.1930 Oradea/RO - 5.1.2002 Timişoara/RO

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Octavian Traian Popa graduated as a mechanical engineer from the Polytechnic School of Timişoara in 1952 and there gained the PhD title in 1958. Popa was appointed in 1961 chief engineer at the Timişoara Mechanics Faculty, was promoted in 1965 to Lecturer and in 1969 took over as aerodynamics professor until retirement in 1990. He there headed in parallel the Timişoara Research Center for Hydraulic Machinery, one of Romania's technological key institutions dealing with turbines among others. Popa was a Member of Germany's Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik GAMM from 1971 and the American Mathematical Society AMS from 1994.

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Popa's PhD thesis was on the subject Grid profiles of Carafoli type. Elie Carafoli (1901-1983) was the outstanding aerodynamicist who was educated in France and had a large impact in Romania from the 1950s to 1970s. Popa contributed during his professional career to the following main topics: Plane potential flow in presence with multi-stage aerofoils, Cavitation phenomena in plane and periodic flows, Integral representations for arbitrary tensor fields, Kinetic energy transfer across a control volume for laminar and turbulent flows, Hydrodynamics of turbo machinery, and Global theory of boundary layers. Popa was awarded the First Prize of the Ministry of Education in 1960 and the 1967 Traian Vuia Award from the Romanian Academy of Sciences for his works in cavitation.

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_{Popa, O. (1964). Formula de inversiune a integralelor de tip Cauchy prin care se defineşte câmpul de viteze în exteriorul retelelor de profile subtiri. Comm. Conference de Maşini Hidraulice: 261-292.}

_{Popa, O. (1967). Contributions to the calculation of hydrofoil cascades by means of the singularity method. Revue Roumaine des Sciences Techniques Mécanique Appliquée 12(4): 803-825.}

_{Popa, O. (1975). Mecanica fluidelorşi hidraulice. Lito: Timişoara.}

_{Popa, O. (1981). The exact and explicit solution to the problem of the plane potential motion past aerofoils of Carafoli type. Revue Roumaine des Sciences Technique Mécanique Appliquée 26(5): 645-658.}

_{Popa, O. (1993). Leçons sur l'hydrodynamique des turbomachines. Ecole Supérieure de Mécanique: Marseille.}

_{Popa, O. (2004). Mecanica fluidelor. Tempus: Timişoara. P}