Teaching Hydraulics and Hydraulic Structure Design with Leonardo da Vinci

Abstract

Leonardo da Vinci is a fascinating and inspiring person, and is called a universal genius for his large variety of scientific and artistic interests and contributions, including military engineering, sculpture, painting, astronomy, botany, anatomy, solid mechanics, and so forth. One of his main interests was hydraulics. He made fundamental contributions to our field, and some of his inventions and intuitions continue to challenge hydraulic engineers and researchers. Probably everyone has come across one of his beautiful drawings. However, most ignore the fact that those drawings represent the effort of a human being to understand the governing laws of physical phenomena. In fact, each drawing can be considered a comprehensive representation of hydraulic phenomena, because they furnish insight into physics and stimulate future developments. Inspired by drawings of Leonardo, this paper illustrated an inductive–deductive methodology to teach hydraulics and the modern design of hydraulic structures at all levels of academic education. In so doing, once again we showed that Prof. Leonardo da Vinci still has a great deal to teach to future generations of engineers and researchers.