|
|
||
|
|
|
|
See: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stco.200990030/abstract
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Maria Esslinger died at the age of 95 in January of this year. She was an “engineer” (as she liked to call herself) who gained an international, lasting name in the development of the analysis of steel bridge decks and research into the buckling of cylindrical shells. She was a very dedicated scientist, fascinated by the possibility of describing the behaviour of real structures by means of mathematical-mechanical models and also by expressing them in computer programs.
She was four years old as her father, the lawyer Dr. Ludwig Esslinger, was killed in the war in 1917. In the Höhere Töchterschule and the Realgymnasium in Nuremberg she was educated among girls only. At the technical universities of Danzig (Gdansk) and Berlin (four semesters in each) she was almost the only “girl” among all the students of ship and aircraft construction. Her diploma thesis of 1936 dealt with the design of a sporting airplane.
After her diploma she worked in industry as a construction engineer with great commitment. At the Dingler-Company in Zweibrücken (1937–44) her projects covered wind tunnels (also for the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt der Luftfahrt DVL – now the German Aerospace Centre – in Berlin and Braunschweig), pressure pipes and welded steel structures. She asked Professor Prandtl in Göttingen for the theme for a doctor thesis. He declined and recommended instead the theory of shells by Wilhelm Flügge.
At the structural steelwork company Seibert, firstly in Aschaffenburg and from 1948 onwards in Saarbrücken, she added experimental research, bridge-building and stability problems to her knowledge. She submitted the results of experiments and analyses for boiler bottoms as a dissertation to Professor Kurt Klöppel at Darmstadt Technical University, who met her for the first time on the day of her doctorate examination in 1947. Director Seibert took her under his wing by encouraging her to write papers about her professional results, by granting and paying for leave for one semester at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris (afterwards many of her papers were written in French) and by supporting her habilitation at the University of the Saar Territory in 1953 with a thesis on multihanger girders.
Thus, Maria Esslinger advanced to become fully engaged in the analysis of bridges, firstly (1955–58) at MAN in Mainz-Gustavsburg, and then at Gollnow in Düsseldorf (1958–60). Together with W. Pelikan she published a book on the analysis and construction of orthotropic steel bridge decks. This book gained her an international reputation. Working with Prof. Klöppel, she learned how to design and analyse suspension bridges. In 1959 she was offered the “venia legendi” for steel bridge decks and in 1967 appointed “Professor Extraordinarius” at Darmstadt Technical University. For two years she received a stipend from the German Research Foundation DFG (programmes for the analysis of suspension bridges).
In 1962 Professor Wilhelm Thielemann asked her to join him in Braunschweig for a research project investigating the buckling of thin cylindrical shells at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft- & Raumfahrt DFL/DLR (now the German Aerospace Centre). It was here that Maria Esslinger became an internationally renowned expert on experimental and analytical research into buckling shells, not only for computer programming but also for slow-motion films of experimental behaviour. Her reputation is high from Stanford to Israel. She was very often the only woman in the masculine world of structural mechanics. And after being appointed a member of the Braunschweig Academy of Sciences in 1978 she was the only lady among all the professors.
Maria Esslinger worked at the DLR on a consulting contract and with her own team well beyond retirement age (1978–95). She was involved in conferences and working groups, e.g. codes for the design of thin shells at the German Steel Construction Committee. She was a determined, ambitious, occasionally argumentative scientist and engineer of great repute. At a great age she wrote her memoirs “Windkanal des Lebens” (the wind tunnel of life), in which her way of thinking and her approach to the ups and downs of life are reflected, too.
----------Heinz Duddeck, Braunschweig TU
Page 150 / 220