John Frederick Clarke

After his schooling, he got training from Fleet Air Arm as a Navy Pilot and then from Royal Air force at Lossiemouth. He left Navy and worked few months at Armstrong Siddeley Motors, but his interest were in academics. Subsequently he quit the job and joined Queen Mary College in Aeronautical engineering course in 1949. He married Jean Gentle in 1953. His thesis advisor Norman A.V. Piercy died in 1953,[3] then he temporarily advised by Leslie G. Whitehead and then finally by Alec David Young. He received his PhD at Queen Mary College in 1957. He briefly worked for English Electric company from 1955 to 1957. In 1958 he joined Cranfield University as a lecturer and stayed there till 1991. After his retirement he continued to do research for a decade. His research interests were Shock waves, detonations, gas dynamics, flame theory etc.

Clarke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982.[1] His nomination reads:

Professor Clarke is distinguished particularly for his analytical work on the gas dynamics of reacting flows. He has shown how, in the presence of solid boundaries, flows are affected by dissociation, heat conduction and by relaxation of the internal molecular modes. On flame structure he has used perturbation techniques to obtain realistic models in various geometries and has been able to show good agreement with experimental results; he has also studied explosive atmospheres under the influence of various disturbances. His work on supersonic flow has included analyses of shock structure in reacting gases as well as shockless flow with attached flame sheets. Apart from reacting gases he has worked on unsteady aerodynamics both of wing-bodies and of pipe flows.[4]