|
 |
Name: |
Prof.dr.ir. J.J. Kalker (Joost) |
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Birthdate: |
25
July 1933 |
| |
|
| 1958 |
Mathematical Engineer at TU Delft |
| 1967 |
PhD |
Biography Joost Kalker
(1933–2006)
Joost Kalker was born in The
Hague on 25 July 1933. Joost attended the Gymnasium in the Hague
from 1945 – 1951 and entered TUDelft as a student of physics,
but then got transferred to mathematics and graduated cum laude
in 1958 as the first Mathematical Engineer. It was there that he
met his wife Cordelia Kalkman (Cokkie). After his military
service, back in Holland, he was appointed as an Assistant
Professor at TUDelft, and he took his PhD cum laude in the
Mechanical Engineering Department. His research supervisor was
A.D. de Pater, a name well known to members of the IAVSD(Int.
Ass. Of Vehicle System Dynamics), who introduced him to wheel–rail
contact problems, which play such an important part in the
vehicle system dynamics.
My first meeting with Joost
was in about 1956 when he visited Cambridge with de Pater. I was
immediately impressed by his sharp mind and enthusiasm. His PhD
dissertation: ‘On the rolling contact of two elastic bodies in
the presence of dry friction’ was a real magnum opus. It
established for all time the mechanics of frictional rolling
contact under arbitrary combinations of tangential force and
spin, which govern the curving and dynamical stability of
railway vehicles. His results are used by the railway
dynamicists world wide. In 1979, Kalker presented a state of the
art ‘Survey of wheel–rail rolling contact theory’ at the IAVSD
Conference, followed by several papers on wheel–rail contact
mechanics published in VSD. For a number of years, he was a
member of the Editorial Board. In the years that followed,
further significant advances were achieved. He showed that he
was not slavishly tied to mathematical exactitude, but by
developing his simplified theory, in which the elastic continua
were replaced by Winkler foundation type models, he gave rise to
readily calculated values of contact forces in conditions of
arbitrary creep.
Kalker was the first to tackle
the transient rolling contact problem that follows a sudden
change of imposed force, or under the action of an oscillating
force. He also developed a variational method for finding the
contact area and pressure with arbitrary profiled bodies. All
these works were brought together in a scholarly, but eminently
useful book: Three dimensional elastic bodies in rolling contact
(Kluwer, 1990). By combining Archard’s wear law (wear rate is
proportional to the product of contact pressure and sliding
speed) with rolling contact mechanics, Kalker and his students
predicted the wear of wheels and rails during curving and
dynamic motion of the vehicle.
In 1999, Kalker organised a course on ‘Rolling
Contact Phenomena’ at the International Centre for Mechanical
Sciences at Udine in Italy, with seven leading experts as
lecturers and 60 students. The proceedings (Ed., Jacobson &
Kalker, Springer 2000) provide the best possible introduction to
the subject for the student of vehicle system dynamics. It was a
very fitting climax to the most successful career.
He is survived by his devoted wife Cokkie and two children.
By: K.L. Johnson Cambridge, June 2006
* Copies of papers of Joost Kalker can be
ordered by email:
Kalker@zonnet.nl |
