Maurice Anthony Biot
Maurice Anthony Biot ( born May 25, 1905 in Antwerp, † September 12, 1985 in New York ) was a Belgian- American physicist and founder of the mechanics of porous media.
Life
He studied at the Catholic University of Leuven ( Philosophy, mining engineering and electrical engineering, in which he made statements, respectively ) and the California Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1932 with Theodore von Kármán in Aeronautical Science. Later he taught at Harvard University ( 1934-35 ), the Catholic University of Louvain ( 1935-37 ), Columbia University ( 1937-45 ) and at Brown University ( 1946-50 ). During the Second World War he worked as Lt.. Cdr. for the U.S. Navy. He headed the Department of Structural Mechanics and developed an aerodynamic wing theory of vibrations of aircraft, which also led to design improvements.
After his time at Brown University, he worked as an independent scientific advisor and was associated among other things with Shell and the aerodynamics laboratory at Cornell University.
Biot is the winner of the Timoshenko Medal of the year 1962.
In soil mechanics in 1941, he developed a three-dimensional theory of consolidation after Karl von Terzaghi had previously treated the one-dimensional case. In 1956, he also described wave propagation in fluids in porous media.
In his honor, the ASCE awards the Maurice A. Biot Medal.
Writings
- With von Karman Mathematical methods in engineering - an introduction to the mathematical treatment of engineering problems, McGraw Hill 1940
- Ivan Tolstoy (Editor): Acoustics, Elasticity and Thermodynamics of Porous Media. 21 Papers, Acoustical Society of America, 1992 ( Selected Papers of Biot )
- Variational Principles in heat transfer: a unified Lagrangian analysis of dissipative phenomena, Oxford University Press 1970
- Mechanics of incremental deformation: theory of elasticity and viscoelasticity of solids and fluids INITIALLY stressed, including thermodynamic foundations and applications to finite strain, Wiley 1965