Advances in Hydraulic Engineering Practice: The Last Four Decades and Beyond

Abstract

Over 40 yrs of advancements in the field of hydraulic engineering is presented in order to ascertain the sources of the advancements. In doing so it is hoped that some hint as to the sources of future advancements might be gleaned. Sources not people are emphasized. The tools available to the civil‐hydraulic engineer circa 1940 are examined, followed by a review of the most important advancements which have taken place since 1940. Some of the items covered are the Darcy‐Weisbach pipe friction concept, cavitation, physical modeling, thermal hydraulics, hydraulically induced vibrations, navigation locks, coastal problems, arctic problems, prototype investigations, design manuals, computational hydraulics and manpower education. The sources of support for all of these advancements is then addressed after which a number of problems which have recently been identified are enumerated and some conjectures as to how these problems may be handled are expressed. The unresolved problems, in general, are those that are extremely complex and require large amounts of funds and/or manpower and, in many cases, a unified, coordinated approach to achieve solutions. A typical area is that of field (prototype) data collection. Many of the computational models are weak because the data available for their verification is weak. For practicing engineers to develop more practical designs, the available models must be better verified.