I feel very privileged to be asked to give the 26th R. J. Mitchell Memorial Lecture in honour of a great man whose work and designs inspired many of us in our youth. My lecture tonight covers a period of time similar to that which elapsed between R. J. Mitchell’s death and the first Memorial Lecture by Joe Smith in 1954. In this period, which covered the Second World War and the immediate post-war era, the activities of the British industry were manifest with a proliferation of designs and immense technological and radical advances such as the introduction of the jet engine, the swept wing, early supersonic flight, etc.

It was a period when the evolution of new designs—while led by men of inspiration, vision, genius and persistency like Mitchell—became more and more the work of teams ever increasing in number.

There is no question that the distinguished Rumanian inventor and aircraft designer, Henri Coanda (1886—1972), was a highly gifted and creative man. Many called him a genius. There have been at least five lengthy feature articles in various aeronautical or true adventure magazines extolling his remarkable career and bearing such flamboyant tides as, ‘The Jet-Propelled Genius and His Mighty Blow’ (True, December 1956); ‘The Amazing Dr. Coanda’ (Air Progress, August/September 1965); and ‘The Prowling Mind of Henri Coanda’ (Flying, March ] 967). These articles rightly praise Coanda’s multi-faceted pioneering achievements in pre-fabricated houses, soil regeneration, sea-water desalinisation, solar energy, the discovery of the ‘Coanda Effect’ which is well-known to aerodynamicists, his highly innovative aircraft designs such as a twin-engined machine of 1911 (also proclaimed by some as a world’s first), a vertical take-off aircraft, the 1934 ‘lenticular aerodyne’ (otherwise known as a flying saucer), and so on.

In this paper, the various facets of Kron’s eigenvalue method which have been developed over the past decade by the present writer are drawn together for review purposes and to provide solution algorithms for large scale eigenvalue and response problems which arise, for example, from the need to study large order finite element models in the frequency analysis of ship equipment raft structures. Also included are considerations of eigenvalue sensitivities which are found to be readily calculable by means of simple modification of the basic eigenvalue method. These sensitivities are of importance in the study of vibration transmission paths and hence in the design and positioning of optimum anti-vibration mountings (AVMs).

The log-law for the turbulent flow in a smooth pipe is written as:

With uT determined from the pressure drop along the pipe, the measured velocity distribution can readily be used to determine values of K and B. Alternatively, the power-law variation is written as:

involving again two constants, to be similarly determined.