Andrew D. Dimarogonas

Andrew D. Dimarogonas (1938-2000) was widely recognized as a distinguished authority in various specialties of mechanical engineering, especially mechanical design and vibrations. He was the W. Palm Professor of Mechanical Design and the director of the Manufacturing Program in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. During his career, a strong interest in history continually manifested itself in chapters of various books, technical papers, lectures, and particularly notable, a two-volume history of technology (published in Greek). In his book (co-authored with S. Haddad) Vibration for Engineers, his historical sketches of great engineers and scientists include Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Laplace, Hertz, Stodola, and Timoshenko. Reviews and letters concerning his work on Pythagoras, for example, have appeared in Scientific American (July 1990, p. 25), R&D Magazine (Sept. 1990, p. 3), The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 9, 1990, p. A10), Science News (May 12, 1990 (p. 295), and New Scientist (July 14, 1990, p. 23).

Dr. Dimarogonas was engineering manager of a Greek steel mill, supervising 800 professional and technical employees involved in production, renovation, and computer integration from 1982 to 1984. He had been the technical leader of mechanical development of the Large Steam Turbine Generation Division of General Electric, Schenectady, New York, 1967-74. He consulted in the manufacturing sector since that time, dealing with such diverse products as balancing machinery, automotive fuel pump, intelligent equipment design and nondestructive testing, industrial automation, engine rotor dynamics and the development of a 500-ton railroad car. He had also taught at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa. (1972-74), and served as professor, director of the Mechanical Design Division, dean of the school of engineering and chair of the department of mechanical engineering from 1974 to 1986 at the Athens National University of Technology (NUT) in Greece. He was selected as the holder of the Russell Severance Springer Professorship (mechanical engineering department) at the University of California, Berkeley, 1993.

His books on computer-aided machine design in 1988 and computer programs for mechanical engineers in 1993 won him international acclaim as a leading expert in the field of behavior of cracked rotating machinery. This is a hugely important technological problem for aging turbo-generators, aircraft, and other rotors (generally, built in the 1960s with 30-year operating life spans). Dr. Dimarogonas's methodology for monitoring vibrations of these systems permits the diagnosis of the need for correction or replacement. He had tremendous depth of understanding of the physical phenomena involved, of their analytical modeling and also in corroborating techniques of numerical analysis.

Dr. Dimarogonas recently turned his expertise toward biomechanical design and structural fault diagnosis and prognosis, which led to the development of a machine to diagnose osteoporosis using a wide-band sound sweep excitation and a similar machine for nondestructive diagnosis of fatigue of materials before the crack initiation and propagation stages. He received 5 patents in this area since 1995. (Several older patents in the areas of turbomachinery and machinery automation were assigned to the sponsoring organizations.)

As an engineer-historian, Dr. Dimarogonas scrutinized many major scientific libraries in the United States and Europe for source material. He documented that the fundamental axioms of design were discovered during the middle of the last century in Europe and traced the origin of vibration theory to Archimedes and others of that period by unearthing obscure documents in continental libraries. He brought to light certain important historical developments in the field of dynamics and vibrations that were either glossed over or not fully understood.

The following works by Andrew D. Dimarogonas are recommended reading:

"Ancient Greek Science and Engineering" (in Greek), Hellenic Letters Publishers, Athens, 1997.

With S. Haddad: Introductory chapter in Vibration for Engineers, Prentice-Hall, 1992; 2nd Ed., Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Private Higher Education in Greece: The "Platonian University." The Johns Hopkins University Press: Journal of Modern Greek Studies, volume 13, No. 2 (1995) 201-215.

"The Origins of Engineering Design," ASME 1993 Design Engineering Conferences, Albuquerque, NM. DE-Vol. 63, Vibrations of Mechanical Systems and the History of Mechanical Design, pp. 1-18.

Impact Engineering and the Persian Wars. ASME Summer Meeting --June 1995 : Los Angeles; CA. Impact, Waves, and Fracture Symposium, pp. 35-42.

"The Origins of the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, "Introductory paper to 40 Years of Modern Kinematics, a tribute to Ferdinand Freudenstein , Erdman, A. (ed), J.Wiley, 1992.

"Mechanisms of the Ancient Greek Theater." Proceedings: ASME Mechanism Conference, Phoenix, v. DE-46, p. 229-234, 1992.

"A Brief History of Rotor Dynamics," keynote address. Rotordynamics 92, Venice. Springer Verlag, p. 1-10, 1992.

"The Origins of Vibration Theory," Journal of Sound and Vibration, v. 140, no. 2, p. 181-189, 1990. Also Transactions of the Academy of Athens (in Greek), v. 48, no. 11, p. 231-245, 1990.

History of Technology, 3rd ed., 2 volumes, 4th ed., Symmetry Publishers, Athens (1988) (in Greek).

[written 1999; updated 24 April 2000]