Albert Betz
(Redirected from Anton Betz)
Albert Betz | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 25, 1885 Schweinfurt, Germany |
| Died | April 16, 1968 (aged 82) |
| Residence | Göttingen, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Betz's law; wind-turbine theory; aerofoil and propeller design |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Fluid mechanics; aerodynamics |
| Institutions | Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Strömungsforschung, Göttingen |
Albert Betz (25 December 1885 – 16 April 1968) was a German physicist and aerodynamicist at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Strömungsforschung in Göttingen, where he worked alongside Ludwig Prandtl in the school that established modern aerodynamics.
He is best known for Betz's law (1919), which shows that no open-flow turbine can extract more than 16/27 — about 59.3% — of the kinetic energy of the wind passing through it. The result is derived from mass and momentum conservation alone, independently of the turbine's design, and it remains the standard efficiency ceiling in wind-power engineering. He also worked extensively on aerofoil theory, propeller design and the treatment of bodies in potential flow.
Abstracts
- 1932 - "Singularitätenverfahren zur Ermittlung der Kräfte und Momente auf Körper in Potentialströmungen" (Read in full) — a classical applied-mechanics paper deriving forces and moments on bodies in potential flow by contracting a momentum-balance control surface onto the flow singularities.