Béla Karlovitz

Béla Karlovitz was a Hungarian engineer, born in 1904 and living to 2004, who pioneered research into generating electricity directly from a body of hot moving gas with no mechanical moving parts, a process known as magnetohydrodynamic or MHD generation. He took a mechanical engineering degree at the Technical University in Budapest and an electrical engineering degree at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He headed the Flame Research Section of the Explosives and Physical Science Division of the Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh and later worked at Combustion and Explosive Research, Inc. in the same city. In combustion science he is known as the first to introduce the concept of flame stretch, and the dimensionless Karlovitz number, which compares the flame stretch rate with a characteristic flow time, is named after him.