MIDDLEBROOKS

MIDDLEBROOKS 13.12. 1903 Yatesville GA/USA 03.02. 1954 Alexandria VA/USA Thomas Alwyn Middlebrooks received the degree of BSc in 1928 in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA. He studied in 1930 under the direction of Karl Terzaghi (18831963) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, Cambridge MA, and thus was one of the pioneers in the application of modern soil mechanics in the US. He became then chief of the Soil Section, US Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg MS. In 1933 he was transferred to Fort Peck MT, responsible for the design and the construction of Fort Peck Dam, then by some standards the largest earth dam worldwide. Among his many publications, the 1942 paper on the Fort Peck Slide was considered appropriate for being awarded by the James Laurie Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers ASCE, whose associate member he was from 1935. During World War II, Middlebrooks served as a consultant on many military projects. He was an active member of technical societies, chairing the US delegation at the Second International Soil Mechanics Conference, held in 1948 at Rotterdam NL. Middlebrooks’ work included levee construction and surveys, soil studies relating to the design of levees, determination of the rate of erosion and silting in rivers; soil studies relative to the design of cutoffs, slides and seepage; control of hydraulic fill, rolled fills, and borrow pit selection; and the soil features of the third set of locks at Panama Canal. He received the Exceptionally Meritorious Award by the War Department in 1944. The ASCE Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award was established in 1955. It is made to authors of ASCE papers worthy of commendation for its merit as a contribution to geotechnical engineering. It consists of a certificate and cash prize. Awardees include Charles I. Mansur (1918-2010), John A. Focht, Jr. (1923-2010), or George F. Sowers (1921-1996). Anonymous (1944). T.A. Middlebrooks, James Laurie Prize. Civil Engineering 14(1): 35. P Anonymous (1955). Thomas A. Middlebrooks. Trans. ASCE 120: 1572-1573. Billington, D.P., Jackson, D.C. (2006). Big dams of the New Deal era: A confluence of engineering and politics. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman OK. Middlebrooks, T.A. (1942). Fort Peck Slide. Trans. ASCE 107: 723-764. Middlebrooks, T.A. (1948). Seepage control for large earth dams. Proc. 3rd ICOLD Congress Stockholm Q10(R51): 1-16. Middlebrooks, T.A. (1950). Earth dams. Applied sedimentation: 181-192. Wiley: New York. https://gsl.erdc.usace.army.mil/gl-history/images/gl_img_8.jpg P

MILES J.B. 02.02. 1933 St. Louis MO/USA 19.01. 2012 Columbia MO/USA John Bruce Miles obtained his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla, and the PhD degree from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was there an instructor of engineering mechanics from 1954 to 1958, then instructor of engineering mechanics at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale IL until 1963, associate professor there until 1968, from when he took over as professor of engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia MO, until retirement in 1988. Miles was a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics AIAA, and the American Society for Engineering Education ASEE. He was recipient of the A.P. Green Award in 1955 from University of Missouri, or the 1985 SAE Teetor Award in aero-technology. Miles performed the majority of his research in conjunction with NASA Ames space program at Moffett Field CA, continuing in 1970. Previously he had been involved in the design of steam turbines. The 1968 paper on the similarity parameter deals with two parallel co-flowing streams of unequal velocities, a problem of interest in separated flow phenomena. Assuming incompressible flow and equal density fluids with zero pressure gradient, the problem was first dealt with by Henry Görtler ((1909-1987) in 1942. He found the widely accepted error function velocity profile, which depends on a similarity parameter, and found to scatter significantly, so that detailed experiments were conducted, by which a better agreement resulted. Anonymous (1955). Miles, John B. Mechanical Engineering 77(12): 1141. P Anonymous (1985). Miles, John B. Who’s who in Engineering 6: 452. AAES: Washington DC. Anonymous (1992). Miles, John Bruce. Men of achievement 15: 534-535. IBC: Cambridge UK. Miles, J.B., Shih, J.-S. (1968). Similarity parameter for two-stream turbulent jet-mixing region. AIAA Journal 6(7): 1429-1430. Miles, J.B., Kim, J.H. (1968). Evaluation of Coles’ turbulent compressible boundary-layer theory. AIAA Journal 6(6): 1187-1189. Miles, J.B. (1968). Similarity parameter for two-stream turbulent jet-mixing region. Journal of the American Institute Aeronautics and Asteroids 6(7): 1429-1430. Shi, Y., Isaac, K., Miles, J.B. (1997). Computational fluid dynamics simulation of turbulent waverider flow field with sideslip. Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 34(1): 76-82. https://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2012/jan/20/john-bruce-miles-1933-2012/ P