Le laboratoire d’aérothermique

Résumé 0

The Laboratory of Aerothermics In the period between the two wars, aviation was one of the priorities of the policy for the technological and industriel development in France This priority led to the creation of research teams whose purpose was to study various problems. The team formed around Edmond Brun had as its objective the problem of the icing of airplanes. Once this problem was solved, the team was made permanent with the nomination of Brun at the University of Paris. Located at Meudon, the research group became a laboratory of CNRS in 1945. Indeed, icing in planes is just one aspect of thermal exchanges in the atmosphere. The support of the Center enabled the team to get involved in research concerning multiple facets of the core subject – phenomena belonging to a field of research combining the equations of fluid dynamics and those of thermodynamics. Alter trying out various different names for the discipline, the laboratory settled on Aerothermics. The activity of the laboratory was structured around diverse wind tunnels, instruments that can be called heavy equipment. The laboratory was able to develop several lines of research that had immediate results applicable to technology while retaining the characteristics of basic research. These research directions were developed empirically using the heavy equipment so that researchers from CNRS, the universities but also industry, did not slip into this or that disciplinary field. Thus, the diversity of a spectrum ranging from the study of aerosols to the analysis of the thermal phenomena that accompany the reentry of spacecraft into the atmosphere was justified by the unity conferred by experimental practice together with theoretical analysis. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Laboratory for Aerothermics underwent an important evolution. The development of computers made simulation possible, thus reducing the role of observation through traditional means. Transition coincided with the retirement of the “founding father'" and the appointment of anew director. His first task was to reorganize the work of the research teams, who could no longer define their work purely in relation to heavy machinery.