Obituary |
Roman Wengler: an extraordinary engineering life
Roman Wengler became a global leader in the design of concrete dams and spent his entire professional career working at Harza. He contributed to some of the world’s most significant infrastructure projects in China, Iran, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Here his former colleagues and family pay tribute to his remarkable career and contributions to the evolution of the double curvature thin arch dam design
THE PASSING OF ROMAN WENGLER on 8 August 2022 at the age of 95 marks an end of his contributions to the emerging engineering sciences and the development of the arch and double curvature thin arch dam. As part of this tribute, it is interesting to reflect on his achievements in his own words as he left behind autobiographical notes that traced his interest in the development of complex large dam designs on an international scale. Roman went to the Harza Engineering Company in Chicago in 1954 as a young engineering graduate, where in the course of time, he spent his entire career. What made him unique was his curiosity and his desire to explore the frontiers of engineering design that were emerging at the time, as society sought efficient
Top: Roman Peter Wengler (06/06/1927-08/08/2022)
Left: Bendix G-15 was the inhouse Harza computer to help reduce hand calculations of deflections and stresses in the cantilevers and arches. Roman Wengler is pictured foreground left
Below: Roman Wengler pictured far right in April 1967 with Harza and client staff at Mossyrock Dam in the US
solutions for water storage for power production, irrigation, flood control and other purposes. When Roman walked through the door at Harza he said the company “had never designed an arch dam nor did anyone have any experience with doing so”, while reflecting in his own retirement, he added that “arch dam design is not a subject that is taught in engineering school”. As his career developed, Roman found his way into a new group being formed at Harza led by another brilliant engineer, Dr. Jan Veltrop. When Roman was assigned here, he referred to it as “my lucky day”. To sharpen his skills, curiosity took over and Roman and Dr. Veltrop emerged themselves in a book that was authored by the US Bureau of Reclamation on Trial Load Analysis.
Roman made the point that trial load analysis “can become rather tedious when the computational device of the time was a slide rule…no computers, no calculators.” He noted in his reflections that in today’s environment “you might spend a couple of seconds analysing it on a desktop computer” whereas back then it involved months of tedious hand calculations. In continuing to champion emerging designs for double curvature thin arch dams, Roman, who continued to be led by Dr. Veltrop, along with a small group of engineers took their trial load analyses experiences from the Mayfield Dam in Washington State and used some of this knowledge on the new, at the time, Karadj Project in Iran. This was Harza’s first double curvature thin arch dam at 584ft and with an 80MW installed capacity in two units. At this point it was circa 1956 and Roman and his
team were just beginning to experiment with computers, which brought him face to face with IBM’s 704 computer installed in Paris, which he said was done “with much fanfare.” That brought Roman to Paris for a one-year assignment in the period 1957-8, to serve as a liaison to “sort of keep track with what was going on”. He attributes his learning process to a colleague, Wallace Waldorf, who joined Roman in Paris and who’d spent many years with the US Bureau of Reclamation participating in the development of trial load analysis. Roman concluded that, after using the emerging technologies of the time – a big mainframe IBM computer, “sooner or later all trial
10 | November 2022 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
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