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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 23, 2017 / 3:30 PM, Building 8 Auditorium

John D. Anderson, Jr.

"The NACA in the 1930’s – Trailblazing the Technical World of Aerodynamics"

ABSTRACT -- During the 1930s the NACA made pivotal and enduring contributions to the discipline of aerodynamics. Three striking examples are:

  1. The systematic design and testing of families of airfoil shapes, including the now classic laminar flow airfoil series
  2. The NACA Cowling. NACA cowlings, like the NACA family of airfoils, were used by airplane designers world-wide.
  3. Pioneering the intellectual understanding of high-speed aerodynamics, and in particular the cause of the "compressibility problems" plaguing high speed subsonic airplanes during the late 1930s.

The talk will highlight the physical nature of these problems, how the NACA went about their solution, and the principal players who pioneered their solution. During the Airplane Design Revolution of the 1930s, there was also a revolution in applied aerodynamics, and this revolution was driven by the engineers and scientists at the NACA Langley Memorial Laboratory. This talk will tell their story.

SPEAKER -- John D. Anderson, Jr. is Curator of Aerodynamics, National Air and Space Museum, and Professor Emeritus, Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park. Anderson has published ten books, some in multiple editions, in the areas of aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, airplane performance, hypersonic aerodynamics, high-temperature gas dynamics, the history of aerodynamics, and the history of aeronautical engineering.

Hi published titles include A History of Aerodynamics and The Airplane: A History of Its Technology. McGraw-Hill has named its series of aerospace engineering textbooks the "Anderson Series" in recognition of their impact on engineering education.

He is the author of over 120 papers in radiative gas dynamics, re-entry aerothermodynamics, gas dynamic and chemical lasers, computational fluid dynamics, applied aerodynamics, hypersonic flow, and the history of aeronautics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov