Hans Hornung, Emeritus MAE Advisory Board, recipient of the 2011 AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award
Congratulations to Prof. Hans Hornung – Emeritus, from the California Institute of Technology on receiving the 2011 AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award. This is the highest and most prestigious award given out by the Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee. It reflects upon Prof. Hornung's outstanding career accomplishments, specifically on his numerous important theoretical and experimental contributions related to the transition between normal and Mach reflections and nonequlibrium boundary layer transition.
Hans G. Hornung is an emeritus C. L. “Kelly” Johnson Professor of Aeronautics and Director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). He received his bachelor (1960) and master (1962) degrees from the University of Melbourne and his Ph. D. degree (1965) in Aeronautics from Imperial College, London. He worked in the Aeronautical Research Laboratories, Melbourne (1962–63, and 1965–67), and in the Physics Department of the Australian National University (1967–80), with a sabbatical year as a Humboldt Fellow in Darmstadt, Germany, 1974. In 1980 he accepted an offer to head the Institute for Experimental Fluid Mechanics of the DLR in Göttingen, Germany. He left Germany in 1987 to serve as the director of GALCIT. During his time at GALCIT he oversaw the construction of three large facilities: the T5 hypervelocity shock tunnel, the Merrill Wind Tunnel, and a supersonic Ludwieg tube.
He has made contributions in gasdynamics, notably Mach reflection and effects of dissociation, in separated flows, and in wind tunnel technology. He was elected as a foreign member to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1991 and as a foreign associate to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997
