Years devoted to development of aerodynamics in Siberia

Abstract

April 29, 2014 is the 100th anniversary of Vladimir V. Struminskii. He was born in Orenburg in a family of a school teacher Vasilii Ya. Struminskii (1880–1967) and his wife Mariya F. Dmitrovskaya (1884−1972). After studying at school for seven years, he worked as a turner at a factory in Kazan and then at the Dinamo plant in Moscow. In 1933, without leaving his work, Vladimir Struminskii graduated from the school for working youth and entered the Physical Faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. After graduating from the university cum laude, V.V. Struminskii became a post-graduate student at the Institute of Physics at the Moscow State University; in 1941, he defended the candidate’s thesis entitled “Electron theory of solids,” where he presented a solution of the Schroedinger equation for the crystal lattice of alloys. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, Vladimir V. Struminskii was appointed to the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after Academician N.E. Zhukovskii (TsAGI), where he started to study some problems new for him: aerodynamic investigations of finitespan wings. Several years later, he developed a method for calculating the maximum lift force of the wing and the distribution of stall zones over the wing span. A series of experiments with finite-span wings in the full-scale wind tunnel based at TsAGI at high Reynolds numbers confirmed the efficiency of the proposed method of aerodynamic design of the wing. In 1947, Struminskii together with other TsAGI researchers was awarded with the State Prize for the development of new wings for high-velocity airplanes and preparation for their batch production. V. V. Struminskii made a significant contribution to the progress in aeronautics by developing a method of aerodynamic design of the wing from a set of airfoils with a nonseparated flow at the wing tip, which ensured high reliability and safety of flight at high angles of attack; this method was developed during the Great Patriotic War. Before that, a large amount of theoretical activities were performed. Exact solutions of three-dimensional boundary layer equations