Edgar Buckingham

Edgar Buckingham ( born July 8, 1867 in Philadelphia, † April 29, 1940 in Washington, DC) was an American physicist and soil mechanics.

Work

His studies in physics completed Buckingham in 1887 from Harvard University. He also studied in Strasbourg and Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald in 1893 and his doctorate at the University of Leipzig as a doctor of philosophy.

He worked from 1902 to 1906 in the U.S. Department of Agriculture ( United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA) as a soil mechanics and 1907-1937 on the U.S. national standard authority NBS (now National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST). His fields of activity included soil physics, gas properties, acoustics, fluid mechanics and heat radiation. He is also the founder of the Pi - theorem in the field of dimensional analysis.

Buckingham dealt first with the floor ventilation, particularly the loss of carbon dioxide and his subsequent recovery by oxygen. Result of his experiments was that the diffusion is not substantially dependent on the soil structure and the density or the water content of the soil. Having an empirical formula based on its data, Buckingham was able to specify the diffusion constant as a function of air content. His research into the gas transport showed that the exchange of the gases in the bottom ventilation based on diffusion, and is independent of the changes in the atmospheric pressure.

Buckingham's work Studies on the movement of soil moisture has been published on the USDA in 1907. This document contains three sections. The first deals with the evaporation of water below a bottom layer. Buckingham found out that the soil can inhibit the evaporation greatly depending on the nature, especially in the capillaries of the upper layers. The second section considers the drying out of the soil under arid and humid conditions. The third section contains essential connections on the capillary action. Buckingham first realized the importance of adhesion forces between soil and water. These relationships came later as relative permeability in petroleum technology applied.

Life

• Physicist (19th Century )
• Physicist ( 20th century)
• Soil scientists
• Americans
• Man
• Born in 1867
• Died in 1940