Hans Albert EinsteinHis Life as a Pioneering Engineer

ASCE Lobby Display

[Black: -- Connie’s part. Blue – Rob’s part]1. Hans Albert Einstein – His Life as a Pioneering Engineer (info on the book itself, include cover, authors,

whatever – ASCE puts together)2. River Concerns of the Past (the Alpine Rhine and the Arkansas Rivers)3. HAE’s Youth4. HAE’s Establishment 5. Coming to America6. Relationship with Albert 7. Rivers Concerns of Today 7. River Mechanics (include basic ideas and HA’s contributions)9. HAE and his Contemporaries 10. The Missouri River (Pick-Sloan plan and HA’s work on the Missouri 11. HAE as Teacher 12. (no title?) (Photo of HA looking out over river, with inset of full-face smile when he was out sailing; Simple

statement about when and where he died

ASCE Lobby Display -- Outline

2. River Concerns of the Past

Rivers have shaped, and continue to shape, human society. As flows of water and alluvial sediment, they nurture the lives of plants, fish and other animals, and humans, who rely on them for food production, transportation, industrial use, and power. Yet their flow extremes, which can cause flood and drought, erosion and sedimentation, at times bring untold misery and widespread damage.

2. Rivers Concerns of the Past -- GRAPHICS

Flooding along the Alpine Rhine, Switzerland, December 1717

Flooding along the Arkansas River, Oklahoma, May 1957 (Rob to replace this photo with better quality version)

7. Rivers Concerns of Today

The consequences of sediment movement in rivers continue to pose a lengthy list of concerns: the aggradation or degradation of channel beds, flooding, sediment infilling of reservoirs, sedimentation or scour at hydraulic structures such as water intakes and bridges, shifting of channels, and erosion river banks and farmland.

7. Rivers Concerns of Today -- GRAPHICS

The shifting channel of the Missouri River erodes adjacent land

… and cause bridges to fail

8. Flow and Sediment Transport in Rivers

In understanding rivers, two questions are of central importance:

9. How much bed sediment can a river transport?

10. How does flow depth vary with flow rate?

These two questions occupied Hans Albert Einstein, who delivered several breakthroughs addressing these questions.

Yet his work also revealed how the complex physical characteristics of rivers pose substantial challenges for engineers, and often engage engineers in debate as to effective river engineering methods.

8. River Mechanics -- GRAPHIC

River mechanics is complicated by the presence of two strongly coupled interfaces: water and air, and water and boundary sediment.

The mechanical laws governing the interaction of water flow (Q water) and sediment transport (Q sediment) involve complex physics and great variability of local conditions.

9. Hans Albert Einstein’s Contemporaries

Hans Albert interacted with many seminal mid-20th-century figures who drew attention to the importance of fluid mechanics principles when describing and formulating aspects of river mechanics. Yet, in sharing his father’s tenacity for pursuing viewpoints dearly held, and aversion to studying the published literature of peers, Hans Albert’s interactions with his contemporaries tended to be rather limited.

9. Hans Albert Einstein’s Contemporaries -- Graphics

Vanoni

Ippen

Daily

Knapp

Christiansen

Rouse

Bakhmeteff

In 1937, when Hans Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, there was a palpable sense that new developments in fluid mechanics and the advent of laboratories had positioned hydraulic engineering for substantial advances .

This photo, taken at Caltech in 1937, shows some of Hans Albert’s contemporaries gathered at a laboratory flume.

Johnson

10. The Missouri River

Hans Albert Einstein consulted extensively for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Missouri River Division, which was charged to oversee a vast watershed stretching from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in the central Midwest upstream to the Rocky Mountains.

The Division was tasked with implementing the Pick-Sloan Plan, which sought to control and regulate the Missouri River’s flow for the purposes of flood control, hydropower generation, and navigation from Omaha to the river’s confluence with the Mississippi River. Pick-Sloan called for five large dams to be constructed along the river. Inevitably, given the substantial sediment load the Missouri conveys, the Division’s mandate to implement Pick-Sloan quickly ran into sediment problems.

10. The Missouri River -- Graphics

The merging of water and sediment at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers illustrates the concerns that sediment posed for dams along the Missouri River

The Pick-Sloan Plan for the Missouri River Basin involved five large dams along the river, and numerous small dams on its tributaries

11. HAE as Teacher

Hans Albert fell naturally into the role of professor. Being a faculty member required that he spend the majority of his time teaching hydraulics classes, mentoring graduate students, and guiding their research, all of which he enjoyed.

11. HAE as Teacher -- Graphic

Hans Albert Einstein instructing undergraduate students in the mid-1960s. He is explaining how jetting (supercritical) flow in an open channel passes through a shock front called a hydraulic jump, and becomes a more tranquil (subcritical) flow