Manfred Heckl – pioneer of industrial acoustics
20 years ago, in August 1996, Manfred Heckl, one of the founding partners of the Müller-BBM GmbH died much too early at the age of 66. This year’s Inter-Noise conference in Hamburg was a good opportunity for the International Institute of Noise Control Engineering I-INCE to commemorate the significant and decisive role of Manfred Heckl in the post-war years when industrial acoustics was still in its infancy. With his methodical approach, simplifying mathematical models by always concentrating on the essential physical phenomena and thus making them more manageable, he succeeded in applying complex acoustic correlations also in practice within the scope of his consulting services.
This excellence also was an important factor for the success of the company Müller-BBM GmbH, founded in 1962 together with his schoolmate and close friend from university Helmut Müller. Manfred Heckl worked there as a consulting engineer until 1973. He obtained his doctorate at the Institute of Technical Acoustics (ITA) of the Technical University of Berlin with a thesis about the sound radiation and sound insulation of cylindrical shells and habilitated in 1973 with a comprehensive overview on flow noise. In the same year, he was appointed chair of technical acoustics of the Technical University of Berlin as successor to Mr. Lothar Cremer with guest professorships in India in 1978 and 1990. In 1975, he authored the “Handbook on Engineering Acoustics” together with Helmut Müller, which many acoustic engineers are still using today in their daily work, and published more than 100 scientific papers in the course of his working life.
Manfred Heckl loved and embodied the phase:
„There is nothing more practical than a good theory.“
