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ALTHOUGH the University of Southampton has had an independent existence for ten years it has roots going back almost a century in the Hartley Institute. An early pioneer in aeronautics, F. W. Lanchester received his technical training in Southampton and the first of the new engineering buildings at the university has been called after him.

A GENERAL solution is obtained for the diffusion of stress in n equal and equally spaced stringers in a stiffened panel subject to any boundary conditions at the ends of the stringers.

IT does not require a very large crystal ball to envisage the growth of aviation during the next fifteen years. Sea travel has become too slow; air travel has become reliable and more independent of weather conditions; world trade has forced travel into the remotest areas; industrial countries have become more affluent, and the urge for private world travel has accompanied affluence. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear the Chairman of the British Airport Authority, Peter Masefield, predict a fifteenfold growth in air traffic in the United Kingdom during the next twenty years and to find the F.A.A. confidently anticipating a doubling of passenger traffic in five years and a nine‐fold increase in small jets in the same period.

I SHOULD like first to say how much I appreciate the honour of being invited to deliver the Wright Brothers Lecture. To anyone whose work is associated in any way with the aeronautical sciences, it must be a source of pride and gratification to be invited to be a chief participant in one of the greatest occasions in the world of aeronautical research, an occasion designed in honour of the two great pioneers, Wilbur and Orville Wright. In my own case these feelings are shared with a feeling of humility and of my own unworthiness for the task.

Under this heading are published regularly abstracts of all Reports and Memoranda of the Aeronautical Research Council, Reports and Technical Notes of the United States National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and publications of other similar Research Bodies as issued

THE conference opened with the paper by Mr Woodward‐Nutt, which, together with the other papers, is summarized below. After the first session the conference luncheon was held, and the principal speakers were the Mayor of Southampton, Alderman R. E. Edmunds, who welcomed the conference to Southampton, and Sir Edward Boyle, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, who referred to current concern about delays in fighter deliveries. He said that there had in the last year been setbacks, but the delays were due to difficulties of development rather than of production. The comparison which was often made of deliveries during the last war was not fair, because the aircraft in question had then been developed. The Spitfire took five years to develop, and this did not compare so unfavourably with the development of the Hunter, when the increase in complexity and the aerodynamic difficulties of the transonic region were considered. Flight trials were the only indication of many of these troubles, and modifications were necessary after the tests. It was for this reason that the Ministry had adopted the policy of ordering up to twenty development aircraft, with the intention that by the time the last one had been built it would be in a form suitable for the production version.

Ignition process is a critical issue in combustion systems. It is particularly important for reliability and safety prospects of aero-engine. This paper aims to numerically investigate the burner-to-burner propagation during ignition process in a full annular multiple-injector combustor and then validate it by comparing with experimental results.

The annular multiple-injector experimental setup features 16 swirling injectors and two quartz tubes providing optical accesses to high-speed imaging of flames. A Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes model, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and complete San Diego chemistry are used to predict the ignition process.

The ignition process shows an overall agreement with experiment. The integrated heat release rate of simulation and the integrated light intensity of experiment is also within reasonable agreement. The flow structure and flame propagation dynamics are carefully analyzed. It is found that the flame fronts propagate symmetrically at an early stage and asymmetrically near merging stage. The flame speed slows down before flame merging. Overall, the numerical results show that the present numerical model can reliably predict the flame propagation during the ignition process.

The dedicated AMR method together with detailed chemistry is used for predicting the unsteady ignition procedure in a laboratory-scale annular combustor for the first time. The validation shows satisfying agreements with the experimental investigations. Some details of flow structures are revealed to explain the characteristics of unsteady flame propagations.