Background
Jakob Ackeret was born in 1898 in Switzerland.
Jakob Ackeret was born in 1898 in Switzerland.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in 1927. After completing his Doctor of Philosophy, Ackeret worked at Escher Wyss AG in Zurich as Chief Engineer of Hydraulics, where he applied, with great success, modern aerodynamics to the design of turbines.
He is widely viewed as one of the foremost aeronautics experts of 20th century. He received his Diploma degree in Mechanical Engineering from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in 1920 under the supervision of Aurel Stodola. From 1921 to 1927 he worked with Ludwig Prandtl at the "Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt" in Göttingen, witnessing a legendary period in the development of modern fluid dynamics.
He became a professor of Aerodynamics at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in 1931 where Wernher von Braun was one of his students.
Ackeret was an expert on gas turbines and was known for his research on propellors and on high-speed propulsion problems. When he was at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, he actively participated in the solution of practical engineering problems, such as the design of variable-pitch propellers for ships and airplanes.
His most important invention was the gas turbine with a closed circuit. He made the invention together with C. Keller.
Ackeret also contributed significantly to research in supersonic aerodynamics.
He led the initial work on calculating the lift and drag on a supersonic airfoil and he proposed the designation of the "Mach number" for multiples of the speed of sound. On a conference in Rome in 1935 Ackeret presented a design for a supersonic wind tunnel. Ackeret was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luftund Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering" in 1965.
In 1976, he was elected foreign associate member of the American National Academy of Engineering for his "contributions to the understanding of high-speed and supersonic fluid mechanics, leading to significant improvements to the science of flight".