OMBECK

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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29.5.1886 Essen/D - 27.12.1963 Wiesbaden/D

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Hugo Ombeck graduated as a mechanical engineer from the Darmstadt Technical University in 1911 and submitted a PhD thesis two years later. His entire career until retirement in 1961 was spent with Gesellschaft für Linde's Eismaschinen, a furnisher of industrial cooling and refrigeration machinery in Wiesbaden. In parallel Ombeck was active in professional organisations, for example in the Verein Deutscher Maschinenbau Anstalten VDMA and in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kälteindustrie, a working association with interests in refrigeration engineering. He was also the chairman of the German association of refrigeration engineering, and associated to its journal Kältetechnik. He was awarded from the president of Germany the Cross of Merits in 1953. In 1952, Ombeck received the decoration Ehrensenator from TU Darmstadt. Ombeck was a Member VDI from 1912. He was awarded Honorary Membership of Deutscher Kältetechnischer Verein DKV in 1959.

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Ombeck's thesis was a typical research topic of the time. It related to the head loss of fluids in prismatic pipelines. Shortly before Ombeck had started his experiments, the results of Rudolf Biel (1873-1955) and Heinrich Blasius (1883-1970) were published. Both tackled with the problem of surface roughness. Whereas Biel proposed a general approach, Blasius exclusively considered a relation for the friction coefficient in the turbulent smooth flow regime. Ombeck conducted his experiments with air and verified Blasius' relation first for smooth pipes. Then, he proceeded to rough pipes and conducted experiments in the turbulent transition regime. The final result was a power law in which the relative roughness was contained in the exponent. Ombeck's main contribution to this fundamental hydraulic problem was the extensive data basis. The fundamentals of pipe flow were solved in the 1930s, based on the boundary layer theory devised by Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953) and expanded by Theodor von Karman.

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_{Anonymous (1956). Direktor Dr. Hugo Ombeck 70 Jahre alt. Kältetechnik 8(5): 179. P}

_{Anonymous (1959). Hugo Ombeck. Kältetechnik 11(11): 375. P}

_{Anonymous (1964). Dr.-Ing. Hugo Ombeck. Kältetechnik 16(2): 61. P}

_{Nesselmann, K. (1961). Direktor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Ombeck 75 Jahre alt. Kältetechnik 13(5): 205-}

_{206. P}

_{Ombeck, H. (1914). Druckverlust strömender Luft in geraden zylindrischen Rohrleitungen. Forschungsarbeiten auf dem Gebiete des Ingenieurwesens 158/159. VD: Berlin.}

_{Ombeck, H. (1921). Wasserdestillationsanlagen mit Wärmepumpe. Zeitschrift VDI 65(2): 64- 66.}