bending+line

accelerated analysis

aerodynamic analysis

aeroelasticanalysis

aeroservoelastic analysis

bending analysis

Bode analysis

boundary element analysis

buckling analysis

campaign analysis

canard-wing analysis

characteristic analysis

closed-loop analysis

covariance analysis

crack growth analysis

crack propagation analysis

crash analysis

decoupled analysis

deferred-time analysis

describing function analysis

divergence analysis

dynamic response analysis

effectiveness analysis

eigenvalue analysis

elastoplastic analysis

elastostatic analysis

equivalent plate analysis

fatigue analysis

finite-element analysis

flap-lag analysis

flight dynamics analysis

flight data analysis

Floquet analysis

flow analysis

flutter analysis

Fourier analysis

fractographic analysis

fracture analysis

frequency domain analysis

frequency-of-maintenance analysis

Galerkin analysis

harmonic analysis

heavy-rain analysis

hover analysis

hydroelastic analysis

inelastic analysis

J-integral analysis

lateral-directional analysis

lifting-line analysis

loads analysis

longitudinal analysis

Mach box analysis

maneuver analysis

mass property analysis

matrix analysis

mission analysis

mission-area analysis

mixed mode analysis

modal analysis

model-based analysis

Monte Carlo analysis

Myklestad analysis

Neal-Smith analysis

nonlinear analysis

nonlinear flutter analysis

Nyquist analysis

open-loop analysis

parabolized Navier-Stokes analysis

parameter analysis

parametric analysis

pilot-in-the-loop analysis

pilot-vehicle analysis

pneumodynamic analysis

post-buckling analysis

pre-aerobatic analysis

predevelopment analysis

PSD analysis

R-R analysis

Rayleigh-Ritz analysis

real-time analysis

regression analysis

repair-level analysis

root-locus analysis

rotor-body analysis

rotor-fuselage analysis

rotorcraft analysis

second-approximation analysis

sensitivity analysis

signature analysis

single-degree-of-freedom analysis

single-sortie analysis

singular perturbation analysis

small-perturbation analysis

spectral analysis

spectrum analysis

stability analysis

statistical analysis

stress analysis

structural analysis

structural dynamic analysis

tension analysis

time dependent analysis

time domain analysis

tradeoff analysis

transient analysis

trending analysis

trim analysis

trim point analysis

V-g analysis

vibration analysis

viscoplastic analysis

viscous/inviscid analysis

Weibull analysis

weight tradeoff analysis

wind shear analysis

X-ray analysis

angle-of-attack slope

approach slope

bending slope

camber-line slope

climb slope

gain slope

glide slope

lift-curve slope

optical glide slope

pitching moment slope

sectional lift slope

stable pitching moment slope

stick-force slope

trim slope

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Domestic appliances and interiors

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Breuer began his student days following an art course in Vienna, but joined the Bauhaus at Weimar, where he later graduated, in 1920. When Gropius re-established the school in purpose-built structures at Dessau, Breuer became a member of the teaching staff in charge of the carpentry and furniture workshops. Much of his time there was spent in design and research into new materials being applied to furniture and interior decoration. The essence of his contribution was to relate the design of furniture to industrial production; in this field he developed the tubular-steel structure, especially in chair design, and experimented with aluminium as a furniture material as well as pieces of furniture made up from modular units. His furniture style was characterized by an elegance of line and a careful avoidance of superfluous detail. By 1926 he had furnished the Bauhaus with such furniture in chromium-plated steel, and two years later had developed a cantilevered chair.

Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 and set up an architectural practice in Berlin. In the early 1930s he also spent some time in Switzerland. Notable from these years was his Harnischmacher Haus in Wiesbaden and his apartment buildings in the Dolderthal area of Zurich. His architectural work was at first influenced by constructivism, and then by that of Le Corbusier (see Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). In 1935 he moved to England, where in partnership with F.R.S. Yorke he built some houses and continued to practise furniture design. The Isokon Furniture Co. commissioned him to develop ideas that took advantage of the new bending and moulding processes in laminated wood, one result being his much-copied reclining chair.

In 1937, like so many of the European architectural refugees from Nazism, he found himself under-occupied due to the reluctance of English clients to embrace the modern architectural movement. He went to the United States at Gropius's invitation to join him as a professor at Harvard. Breuer and Gropius were influential in training a new generation of American architects, and in particular they built a number of houses. This partnership ended in 1941 and Breuer set up practice in New York. His style of work from this time on was still modern, but became more varied. In housing, he adapted his style to American needs and used local materials in a functional manner. In the Whitney Museum (1966) he worked in a sculptural, granite-clad style. Often he utilized a bold reinforced-concrete form, as in his collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss in the Paris UNESCO Building (1953–8) and the US Embassy in the Hague (1954–8). He displayed his masterly handling of poured concrete used in a strikingly expressionistic, sculptural manner in his St John's Abbey (1953–61) in Collegeville, Minnesota, and in 1973 his Church of St Francis de Sale in Michigan won him the top award of the American Institute of Architects.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Mining and extraction technology, Weapons and armour

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The son of a barber-surgeon who deserted his family to serve in the Swedish army, Nobel showed little interest in academic pursuits as a child and was sent to sea at the age of 16, but jumped ship in Egypt and was eventually employed as an architect by the pasha. Returning to Sweden, he won a scholarship to the Stockholm School of Architecture, where he studied from 1821 to 1825 and was awarded a number of prizes. His interest then leaned towards mechanical matters and he transferred to the Stockholm School of Engineering. Designs for linen-finishing machines won him a prize there, and he also patented a means of transforming rotary into reciprocating movement. He then entered the real-estate business and was successful until a fire in 1833 destroyed his house and everything he owned. By this time he had married and had two sons, with a third, Alfred (of Nobel Prize fame; see Alfred Nobel), on the way. Moving to more modest quarters on the outskirts of Stockholm, Immanuel resumed his inventions, concentrating largely on India rubber, which he applied to surgical instruments and military equipment, including a rubber knapsack.

It was talk of plans to construct a canal at Suez that first excited his interest in explosives. He saw them as a means of making mining more efficient and began to experiment in his backyard. However, this made him unpopular with his neighbours, and the city authorities ordered him to cease his investigations. By this time he was deeply in debt and in 1837 moved to Finland, leaving his family in Stockholm. He hoped to interest the Russians in land and sea mines and, after some four years, succeeded in obtaining financial backing from the Ministry of War, enabling him to set up a foundry and arms factory in St Petersburg and to bring his family over. By 1850 he was clear of debt in Sweden and had begun to acquire a high reputation as an inventor and industrialist. His invention of the horned contact mine was to be the basic pattern of the sea mine for almost the next 100 years, but he also created and manufactured a central-heating system based on hot-water pipes. His three sons, Ludwig, Robert and Alfred, had now joined him in his business, but even so the outbreak of war with Britain and France in the Crimea placed severe pressures on him. The Russians looked to him to convert their navy from sail to steam, even though he had no experience in naval propulsion, but the aftermath of the Crimean War brought financial ruin once more to Immanuel. Amongst the reforms brought in by Tsar Alexander II was a reliance on imports to equip the armed forces, so all domestic arms contracts were abruptly cancelled, including those being undertaken by Nobel. Unable to raise money from the banks, Immanuel was forced to declare himself bankrupt and leave Russia for his native Sweden. Nobel then reverted to his study of explosives, particularly of how to adapt the then highly unstable nitroglycerine, which had first been developed by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, for blasting and mining. Nobel believed that this could be done by mixing it with gunpowder, but could not establish the right proportions. His son Alfred pursued the matter semi-independently and eventually evolved the principle of the primary charge (and through it created the blasting cap), having taken out a patent for a nitroglycerine product in his own name; the eventual result of this was called dynamite. Father and son eventually fell out over Alfred's independent line, but worse was to follow. In September 1864 Immanuel's youngest son, Oscar, then studying chemistry at Uppsala University, was killed in an explosion in Alfred's laboratory: Immanuel suffered a stroke, but this only temporarily incapacitated him, and he continued to put forward new ideas. These included making timber a more flexible material through gluing crossed veneers under pressure and bending waste timber under steam, a concept which eventually came to fruition in the form of plywood.

In 1868 Immanuel and Alfred were jointly awarded the prestigious Letterstedt Prize for their work on explosives, but Alfred never for-gave his father for retaining the medal without offering it to him.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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At the age of 16 Charles Spooner helped his father, James, to build the Festiniog Railway, a horse-and-gravity tramroad; they maintained an even gradient and kept costs down by following a sinuous course along Welsh mountainsides and using a very narrow gauge. This was probably originally 2 ft 1 in. (63.5 cm) from rail centre to rail centre; with the introduction of heavier, and therefore wider, rails the gauge between them was reduced and was eventually standardized at 1 ft 11 1/2 in (60 cm). After James Spooner's death in 1856 Charles Spooner became Manager and Engineer of the Festiniog Railway and sought to introduce steam locomotives. Widening the gauge was impracticable, but there was no precedent for operating a public railway of such narrow gauge by steam. Much of the design work for locomotives for the Festiniog Railway was the responsibility of C.M.Holland, and many possible types were considered: eventually, in 1863, two very small 0–4–0 tank locomotives, with tenders for coal, were built by George England.

These locomotives were successful, after initial problems had been overcome, and a passenger train service was introduced in 1865 with equal success. The potential for economical operation offered by such a railway attracted widespread attention, the more so because it had been effectively illegal to build new passenger railways in Britain to other than standard gauge since the Gauge of Railways Act of 1846.

Spooner progressively improved the track, alignment, signalling and rolling stock of the Festiniog Railway and developed it from a tramroad to a miniaturized main line. Increasing traffic led to the introduction in 1869 of the 0–4–4–0 double-Fairlie locomotive Little Wonder, built to the patent of Robert Fairlie. This proved more powerful than two 0–4–0s and impressive demonstrations were given to engineers from many parts of the world, leading to the widespread adoption of narrow-gauge railways. Spooner himself favoured a gauge of 2 ft 6 in. (76 cm) or 2 ft 9 in. (84 cm). Comparison of the economy of narrow gauges with the inconvenience of a break of gauge at junctions with wider gauges did, however, become a continuing controversy, which limited the adoption of narrow gauges in Britain.

Bogie coaches had long been used in North America but were introduced to Britain by Spooner in 1872, when he had two such coaches built for the Festiniog Railway. Both of these and one of its original locomotives, though much rebuilt, remain in service.

Spooner, despite some serious illnesses, remained Manager of the Festiniog Railway until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Wöhler, the son of a schoolteacher, was born at Soltau on the Luneburg Heath and received his early education at his father's school, where his mathematical abilities soon became apparent. He completed his studies at the Technical High School, Hannover.

In 1840 he obtained a position at the Borsig Engineering Works in Berlin and acquired there much valuable experience in railway technology. He trained as an engine driver in Belgium and in 1843 was appointed as an engineer to the first Hannoverian Railway, then being constructed between Hannover and Lehrte. In 1847 he became Chief Superintendent of rolling stock on the Lower Silesian-Brandenhurg Railway, where his technical abilities influenced the Prussian Minister of Commerce to appoint him to a commission set up to investigate the reasons for the unusually high incidence of axle failures then being encountered on the railways. This was in 1852, and by 1854, when the Brandenburg line had been nationalized, Wöhler had already embarked on the long, systematic programme of mechanical testing which eventually provided him with a clear insight into the process of what is now referred to as "fatigue failure". He concentrated initially on the behaviour of machined iron and steel specimens subjected to fluctuating direct, bending and torsional stresses that were imposed by testing machines of his own design.

Although Wöhler was not the first investigator in this area, he was the first to recognize the state of "fatigue" induced in metals by the repeated application of cycles of stress at levels well below those that would cause immediate failure. His method of plotting the fatigue stress amplitude "S" against the number of stress cycles necessary to cause failure "N" yielded the well-known S-N curve which described very precisely the susceptibility to fatigue failure of the material concerned. Engineers were thus provided with an invaluable testing technique that is still widely used in the 1990s.

Between 1851 and 1898 Wöhler published forty-two papers in German technical journals, although the importance of his work was not initially fully appreciated in other countries. A display of some of his fracture fatigue specimens at the Paris Exposition in 1867, however, stimulated a short review of his work in Engineering in London. Four years later, in 1871, Engineering published a series of nine articles which described Wöhler's findings in considerable detail and brought them to the attention of engineers. Wöhler became a member of the newly created management board of the Imperial German Railways in 1874, an appointment that he retained until 1889. He is also remembered for his derivation in 1855 of a formula for calculating the deflections under load of lattice girders, plate girders, and other continuous beams resting on more than two supports. This "Three Moments" theorem appeared two years before Clapeyron independently advanced the same expression. Wöhler's other major contribution to bridge design was to use rollers at one end to allow for thermal expansion and contraction.

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