Ken Kavanagh
KAVANAGH, Ken BEng MEng PhD (1943-2024)
Ken was born on January 25, 1943 in Brooklyn New York, one of three children of Thomas Christian Kavanagh and Kerstin Evelina Kavanagh (nee Berglund). Hi parents married in September 1937 and he had an older sister Patricia Frances born in 1941. Ken initially grew up in Los Alamos where his father worked as an aircraft structural engineer. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, his father took up a position as Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at New York University. By 1948, it is likely he was living in State College, a small university town in Pennsylvania, where his father had taken up the role of Professor and Head of the Structures Department at the Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University). In 1952, aged 9, and still in primary school, his father moved back to New York and became Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering. In 1956 he became an adjunct professor at the University of Columbia. (Thomas Christian Kavanagh's contributions are documented at the National Academy of Engineering and The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Pennsylvania State University.
forming his own consulting firm while maintaining academic and industry appointments. Ken completed his first degree in civil engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then went to do post-graduate studies at Cornell University in New York, and his PhD at the University of California Berkeley.
Ken married Jan whose family owned an orange orchard that now lies beneath the original California DisneyWorld and had two children, Kylie and Kim.
Ken and his wife Jan (nee Easton) arrived in Perth on June 29, 1972. They had been married in Orange County, California. The University of Western Australia appointed Ken as a Lecturer in Civil Engineering on a two year contract. At that time, small “mini” computers had become affordable for university departments. Before then, computers were so large and expensive that they were housed and maintained by several staff in a central university “computer centre” building. Ken collaborated with mechanical engineering colleagues to set up the first computer specifically for the two departments to share. The memory capacity was 64 kilobytes and the hard disk drive had a capacity of 5 megabytes.
Ken originally saw the UWA as a short-term appointment. However, when he and Jan compared the view of the Hudson river from his father’s New York city office with the view of the Swan river from the Public Works Department offices in the recently completed fourteen-storey Dumas House at the top of Mount Eliza, they decided to make Western Australia their permanent home.
Ken developed his own finite element modelling code for analysing and optimizing steel structures written in Fortran, the preferred engineering programming language at the time. However, the major influence on his technical interests arrived in the form of cyclone Joan that inflicted catastrophic damage on Port Hedland in 1975.
Professor Douglas Clyde, head of the Civil Engineering department at the time, sent Ken to survey the damage and develop local expertise to ensure that replacement buildings could withstand future cyclones. Ken realized immediately that the two critical requirements were sufficient structural strength to withstand the wind forces, and sufficiently strong fixing of components such as roofing sheets to ensure that they remained fixed, even if a building was struck by flying debris from other buildings. Ken immediately started developing a wind tunnel to test building structures, driving the main fan with an adapted motor vehicle engine from the commercially unsuccessful Leyland P76 car to provide a variable speed drive.
A fortunate connection resulted in a well-paid consulting contract for Ken and his students. Well before the wind tunnel became known in the Perth engineering community, Professor Clyde’s daughter was working as a PA to a senior Woodside engineer. She asked him why he should outsource model testing for the proposed North Rankin platform and the onshore gas plant to Melbourne when the University of Western Australia had just completed a similar facility.
Ken engaged closely with local consulting engineers, most of whom were his former students. He conducted wind tunnel tests for numerous high-profile projects including the Central Park tower and the South32 tower. The latter was originally developed by Alan Bond and subsequently known as the R&I Bank building, re-branded as Bankwest. Other major building projects included the QV1 and the Exchange Plaza.
Ken enlarged his research network with sabbaticals in the UK, USA, Japan and Canada, and enjoyed the travel and adventure while connecting with new colleagues that remained lifelong friends.
Ken served as department head when needed, but always preferred to spend time in the laboratories with technicians and students. Ken led major improvements in the UWA structural laboratories including floor strengthening and adding an overhead gantry crane. He managed to acquire a programmable hydraulic jack from the Midland Railway Workshops which were being decommissioned at the time. It had been used for quality control of prestressed concrete sleepers for the new standard gauge railway under construction in the 1960s. He also developed expertise in earthquake engineering, dynamics and fatigue failure in structures.
Ken only wrote papers for relatively informal conferences such as “Mechanics of Structures and Materials” which Australian and New Zealand Civil Engineering Departments took it in turn to organise. In one, he used his finite element program to analyse the wall loading of the ground floor of a multi storey building. In the next, he compared that solution with black box application of Vlasov’s theory of thin-walled beams. The solutions did not correspond, and this discrepancy had to wait for Prof. Clyde’s retirement before being eventually solved.
Ken’s major contributions to engineering in Australia was in educating thousands of civil engineering students in the practical techniques for designing steel and concrete structures, students who went on to design bridges, buildings and other structures across Australia such as the second Narrows Bridge on the Swan River.
Ken and Jan temporarily revived Joan’s family heritage by establishing an orange orchard in the Chittering Valley as a hobby farm, but soon found that it required a lot of physical work. Ken retired from the University of Western Australia in 2008 after 37 years. Reticent and self-effacing to the end, he destroyed all his technical papers and records, so we have only personal recollections on which to base this account of his life. He died on April 5, 2024, survived by his widow Jan and two children.
References:
James Trevelyan, from personal recollections and contributions from Jan and Kylie Kavanagh, Douglas Clyde and Chris Fitzhardinge.
