ABSTRACT
DETRA 23.03. 1925 Thompsontown PA/USA 30.06. 1997 Gloucester MA/USA Ralph William Detra was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA until 1944, and at Cornell University, Ithaca NY until 1951, from where he moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, submitting his PhD in 1952. After having been a flight test engineer in the late 1940s, and instructor at Mechanical Engineering Department, Cornell University in 1950, he became after return from Switzerland to the USA supervising aerodynamic researcher, Westinghouse Electric Co., within its Aviation Gas Turbine Division, Kansas City MO until 1955. Until 1959 he was engaged then as principal research scientist at Avco Everett Research Laboratory, Everett MA, from where he moved as project manager to Avco Wilmington MA. He was from 1972 to 1981 associated with energy technol, acting there as vice-president, and president until his retirement in 1990. He was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics AIAA. Detra was from the 1950s interested in hypervelocity flight, and high temperature gas dynamics. His PhD thesis includes the main chapters 1. General considerations, 2. Preliminary theoretical investigations, 3. Experimental investigations, 4. Theory for the secondary flow in curved pipes, 5. Application of the theory, and 6. Losses due to secondary flow. It may be noted that in the early 1950s few works on the topic of secondary flow in bends were available, which is on the one hand astonishing because of the fundamental flow pattern and characteristics, but on the other hand may be explained with the relatively poor instrumentation by then available. Anonymous (1964). Detra, Ralph W. Who’s who in engineering 9: 446. Lewis: New York. Detra, P. (2013). Ralph W. Detra. Personal communication. P Detra, R.W. (1953). The secondary flow in curved pipes. ETH Zurich: Zürich. Detra, R.W., Kemp, N.H., Riddell, F.R. (1957). Heat transfer to satellite vehicles re-entering the atmosphere. Jet Propulsion 27(2): 132-137; 27(12): 1256-1257. Detra, R.W., Hidalgo, H. (1961). Generalized heat transfer formulas and graphs for nose cone re-entry into the atmosphere. ARS Journal 31(3): 318-321. Ehrich, F.F., Detra, R.W. (1954). Transport of the boundary layer in secondary flow. Journal of Aeronautical Sciences 21(2): 136-138. Kemp, N.H., Rose, P.H., Detra, R.W. (1959). Laminar heat transfer around blunt bodies in dissociated air. Journal of the Aerospace Sciences 26(7): 421-430.
