Rate My Professor Harald Kleine

Harald Kleine is Associate Professor and Facilities Coordinator in the School of Engineering & Technology at the University of New South Wales Canberra. He obtained his Dipl.-Ing. (equivalent to a Master's degree) and Dr.-Ing. (equivalent to a PhD) in Mechanical/Aeronautical Engineering from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany. During his postgraduate studies, he designed and built advanced optical systems for the visualisation of unsteady high-speed gas flows observed in shock tubes and super- and hypersonic wind tunnels.

After completing his doctorate, Kleine held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from 1995 to 1997, where he further developed his flow visualisation expertise. He subsequently worked for two years at Med-Eng Systems in Ottawa, Canada, on the design and testing of blast protection equipment. In 1999, he joined Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, as invited leader of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering until 2002. Since then, he has served as Senior Lecturer and later Associate Professor at UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, establishing a high-speed flows laboratory that supports research in hypersonics and impact dynamics.

Kleine's research specialises in density-sensitive flow visualisation and its application to gasdynamic problems, including fully unsteady shock wave reflection, focusing, and interaction phenomena, as well as studies of blast wave physics and exterior ballistics. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics and focuses on developing improved time-resolved visualisation techniques using high-speed cameras for shock wave research. His contributions have advanced the experimental investigation of supersonic and hypersonic flows with applications in aerospace engineering.