Dr.-Ing. Robert Kathan (2004-2012), Dr.-Ing. Martin Schmid (2009-2014) and Dr.-Ing. Moritz Schulze (2012-2017) celebrated their doctoral party on February 17th for their families, former and current staff of the Institute of Thermodynamics in the C2 (Campus Cneipe).Their contribution to the research on the stability of rocket motors was highly valued. Their work brought world-class revenue in that field.
Robert Kathan's pioneering work at the institute on acoustics in rocket thrust chambers was highlighted especially and parallels were drawn to rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. His commitment on supervising the lecture Thermodynamics II was appreciated. He was awarded the prize "Goldene Lehre" (Golden Teaching) twice for the best tutorial in the graduate studies.
Martin Schmid's extensive CFD investigations on acoustically excited, hypergolic, liquid propellants in rocket combustion chambers was honored. His work allowed describing the flame dynamics exceeding the
classical approaches.
Moritz Schulze was highlighted as an "academic shooting star" because of the number of his publications. He published 12 papers in journals and 35 overall - the institute's all-time record of one PhD student! Herein he explained plenty of complex effects in rocket combustion chambers. Furthermore he succeeded in quantitatively assessing and validating the stability of a whole thrust chamber. With that, the phenomenon of high frequency instabilities in rocket motors could be understood quantitatively. Recently he got involved in the acquisition of new research projects.
According to tradition the three spacemen were presented with their doctoral hats by their former colleagues of the institute. The hats depict their times at the institute in scenes and figural motives.