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Obituary by Roeland De Breuker and Jan Hol of the Technical University of Delft:
In memoriam, Prof. Dr. Johann Arbocz 1932-2019) (For more see the link:
Prof. Johann Arbocz (1932-2019)
Johann Arbocz was born in Füzesgyarmat, Hungary, on 2 October 1932. After his high school education in Germany, he moved to Brasil to work for the local aircraft industries. Roughly ten years later, he decided to make a career switch and relocate to the United States of America where he pursued his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees. After obtaining his PhD degree in 1968 from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), he became assistant and associate professor at Northrop Institute of Technology and simultaneously research fellow and later senior research fellow at CalTech. He already established his name in the buckling research area working together with Babcock and Sechler.
Johann met the renowned Delft professor Warner T. Koiter at CalTech in 1973. Professor Koiter inspired Johann Arbocz to come to Delft, where Johann joined him in 1976 as the successor to professor van der Neut. Johann was the last professor of TU Delft Aerospace to be appointed personally by the then reigning Queen Juliana, of which he was rightfully very proud. He became chairholder of Aerospace Structures and Computational Mechanics in 1997 and stayed in this position until 2001 when he retired at the age of 69. This was not the norm at the time, but Johann Arbocz arranged a 25-year contract when he was hired to ensure that he could carry out all the research plans he envisioned. After his retirement, he went to NASA as a visiting professor for one year. Upon his return to The Netherlands, he came back to Delft as an emeritus professor, still working at the faculty most days of the week. In 2014, he decided to put down his pencil for good.
The scientific legacy of Johann Arbocz is unmeasurable. To mention a non-exhaustive selection of his achievements, he co-developed STAGS-A with Almroth, a design tool for shell buckling. Together with his Delft co-workers, he developed the Delft Imperfection Databank for the analysis of imperfect shells. Following ideas from Starnes of NASA, he formulated and implemented an Improved Reliability Method of Buckling Load Calculations using Multi-Level High-Fidelity Analysis. This method was the foundation of the ESA Buckling Handbook and part of the work for NASA’s improved knockdown factor. His work on imperfect shells was complemented by nonlinear vibration analysis and the entire vibration and buckling research was eventually synthesised in the analysis programme for imperfect shells called DISDECO. Johann Arbocz continued to build his research on these foundations in collaboration with NASA and ESA, and he expanded his research group both in numerical and experimental research activities.
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