Eric Harold Mansfield. 24 May 1923—20 October 2016

Abstract

Eric Mansfield was a structural engineer who worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough from 1943 to 1983 on a wide range of problems in the field of aircraft structures. His main working tool was the mathematical theory of elasticity, which he deployed with skill, ingenuity, perseverance and imagination to investigate many problems related to the design of aircraft structures during a period of development of higher flight performance and new materials. His studies included aircraft wings and fuselages, particularly in the presence of cut-outs and openings—for which he invented the ‘neutral hole’ concept—and problems involving large-deflection structural behaviour of plates, including thermal effects such as flexural and torsional buckling of fins and wings heated in supersonic flight. He also developed the novel and powerful tension field theory for understanding the post-buckling behaviour of thin webs in shear, and the analogous inextensional bending theory of thin wings. His mathematical models were confirmed by elegant experiments. Mansfield's book The bending and stretching of plates contains clear descriptions of many of his research investigations; it has become a classic text. All of Mansfield's writing is incisive and clear. He was widely regarded as a seminal figure in the field of applied structural mechanics in the second half of the twentieth century.