Yash K.

Menon
AM.EN.P2TF15014

MTech (TF)

Assignment 1

HISTORY OF FLUID MECHANICS

History of Fluid Mechanics

Abstract
In this assignment the development of fluid mechanics is briefly reviewed. This includes
the contribution of great scientist to fluid mechanics.

Pre-history
A pragmatic, if not scientific, knowledge of fluid flow was exhibited by ancient
civilizations, such as in the design of arrows, spears, boats, and particularly hydraulic
engineering projects for flood protection, irrigation, drainage, and water supply. The
earliest human civilizations began near the shores of rivers, and consequently coincided
with the dawn of hydrology, hydraulics, and hydraulic engineering.

1. Archimedes (285-212 B.C.)

The fundamental principles of hydrostatics were given by Archimedes in his work On

Floating Bodies, around 250 BC. In it, Archimedes develops the law of buoyancy, also
known as Archimedes' Principle. This principle states that a body immersed in a fluid
experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. Archimedes
maintained that each particle of a fluid mass, when in equilibrium, is equally pressed in
every direction; and he inquired into the conditions according to which a solid body
floating in a fluid should assume and preserve a position of equilibrium.

2. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo da Vinci pioneered the flow visualization genre close to 500 years ago. The
sketch below- a free water jet issuing from a square hole into a pool - represents perhaps
the world's first use of visualization as a scientific tool to study a turbulent flow.
Leonardo wrote (translated by Ugo Piomelli, University of Maryland), "Observe the
motion of the surface of the water, which resembles that of hair, which has two motions,
of which one is caused by the weight of the hair, the other by the direction of the curls;
thus the water has eddying motions, one part of which is due to the principal current, the
other to the random and reverse motion." According to John L. Lumley, Cornell
University, Leonardo may have prefigured the now famous Reynolds turbulence
decomposition nearly 400 years prior to Osborne Reynolds' own flow visualization and
analysis! In describing the swirling water motion behind a bluff body, da Vinci provided
the earliest reference to the importance of vortices in fluid motion: "So moving water
strives to maintain the course pursuant to the power which occasions it and, if it finds an
obstacle in its path, completes the span of the course it has commenced by a circular and
revolving movement." Leonardo accurately sketched the pair of quasi-stationary,
counterrotating vortices in the midst of the random wake. Finally, da Vinci's words "...
The small eddies are almost numberless, and large things are rotated only by large eddies
and not by small ones, and small things are turned by both small eddies and large"
presage Richardson's cascade, coherent structures, and large-eddy simulations, at least.
He stated the equation of conservation of mass in one dimensional steady flow state. He
also experimented with jets, waves, hydraulic jumps etc.

3. Edme Mariotte (1620-1684)

He built the first wind tunnel and tested models in it. Mariotte is best known for his
recognition in 1679 of Boyle's Law about the inverse relationship of volume and
pressures in gases. The first volume of the Histoire et mmoires de l'Acadmie (1733)
contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as
the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall
of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water etc .

4. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Friction and viscosity

The effects of friction and viscosity in diminishing the velocity of running water were
noticed in the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton, who threw much light upon several
branches of hydromechanics. At a time when the Cartesian system of vortices universally
prevailed, he found it necessary to investigate that hypothesis, and in the course of his
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investigations he showed that the velocity of any stratum of the vortex is an arithmetical
mean between the velocities of the strata which enclose it; and from this it evidently
follows that the velocity of a filament of water moving in a pipe is an arithmetical mean
between the velocities of the filaments which surround it. Taking advantage of these
results, Italian-born French engineer Henri Pitot afterwards showed that the retardations
arising from friction are inversely as the diameters of the pipes in which the fluid moves.
Orifices
The attention of Newton was also directed to the discharge of water from orifices in the
bottom of vessels. He supposed a cylindrical vessel full of water to be perforated in its
bottom with a small hole by which the water escaped, and the vessel to be supplied with
water in such a manner that it always remained full at the same height. He then supposed
this cylindrical column of water to be divided into two parts,the first, which he called the
"cataract," being an hyperboloid generated by the revolution of an hyperbola of the fifth
degree around the axis of the cylinder which should pass through the orifice, and the
second the remainder of the water in the cylindrical vessel. He considered the horizontal
strata of this hyperboloid as always in motion, while the remainder of the water was in a
state of rest, and imagined that there was a kind of cataract in the middle of the fluid.
When the results of this theory were compared with the quantity of water actually
discharged, Newton concluded that the velocity with which the water issued from the
orifice was equal to that which a falling body would receive by descending through half
the height of water in the reservoir. This conclusion, however, is absolutely irreconcilable
with the known fact that jets of water rise nearly to the same height as their reservoirs,
and Newton seems to have been aware of this objection. Accordingly, in the second
edition of his Principia, which appeared in 1713, he reconsidered his theory. He had
discovered a contraction in the vein of fluid (vena contracta) which issued from the
orifice, and found that, at the distance of about a diameter of the aperture, the section of
the vein was contracted in the subduplicate ratio of two to one. He regarded, therefore,
the section of the contracted vein as the true orifice from which the discharge of water
ought to be deduced, and the velocity of the effluent water as due to the whole height of
water in the reservoir; and by this means his theory became more conformable to the
results of experience, though still open to serious objections.
Waves
Newton was also the first to investigate the difficult subject of the motion of waves.

5. Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782)

In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli published his Hydrodynamica seu de viribus et motibus

fluidorum commentarii. His theory of the motion of fluids, the germ of which was first
published in his memoir entitled Theoria nova de motu aquarum per canales quocunque
fluentes, communicated to the Academy of St Petersburg as early as 1726, was founded
on two suppositions, which appeared to him conformable to experience. He supposed that
the surface of the fluid, contained in a vessel which is emptying itself by an orifice,
remains always horizontal; and, if the fluid mass is conceived to be divided into an
infinite number of horizontal strata of the same bulk, that these strata remain contiguous
to each other, and that all their points descend vertically, with velocities inversely
proportional to their breadth, or to the horizontal sections of the reservoir. In order to
determine the motion of each stratum, he employed the principle of the conservatio
virium vivarum, and obtained very elegant solutions. But in the absence of a general
demonstration of that principle, his results did not command the .confidence which they
would otherwise have deserved, and it became desirable to have a theory more certain,
and depending-solely on the fundamental laws of mechanics. Colin Maclaurin and John
Bernoulli, who were of this opinion, resolved the problem by more direct methods, the
one in his Fluxions, published in 1742, and the other in his Hydraulica nunc primum
detecta, et demonstrata directe ex furulamentis pure mechanicis, which forms the fourth
volume of his works. The method employed by Maclaurin has been thought not
sufficiently rigorous; and that of John Bernoulli is, in the opinion of Lagrange, defective
in clearness and precision.

6. Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783)

The theory of Daniel Bernoulli was opposed also by Jean le Rond d'Alembert. When
generalizing the theory of pendulums of Jacob Bernoulli he discovered a principle of
dynamics so simple and general that it reduced the laws of the motions of bodies to that
of their equilibrium. He applied this principle to the motion of fluids, and gave a
specimen of its application at the end of his Dynamics in 1743. It was more fully
developed in his Trait des fluides, published in 1744, in which he gave simple and
elegant solutions of problems relating to the equilibrium and motion of fluids. He made
use of the same suppositions as Daniel Bernoulli, though his calculus was established in a
very different manner. He considered, at every instant, the actual motion of a stratum as
composed of a motion which it had in the preceding instant and of a motion which it had
lost; and the laws of equilibrium between the motions lost furnished him with equations
representing the motion of the fluid. It remained a desideratum to express by equations
the motion of a particle of the fluid in any assigned direction. These equations were found
by d'Alembert from two principles that a rectangular canal, taken in a mass of fluid in
equilibrium, is itself in equilibrium, and that a portion of the fluid, in passing from one
place to another, preserves the same volume when the fluid is incompressible, or dilates
itself according to a given law when the fluid is elastic. His ingenious method, published
in 1752, in his Essai sur la resistance des fluides, was brought to perfection in his
Opuscules mathematiques, and was adopted by Leonhard Euler.

7. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

In 1858 Hermann von Helmholtz published his seminal paper "ber Integrale der
hydrodynamischen Gleichungen, welche den Wirbelbewegungen entsprechen," in
Journal fr die reine und angewandte Mathematik, vol. 55, pp. 2555. So important was
the paper that a few years later P. G. Tait published an English translation, "On integrals
of the hydrodynamical equations which express vortex motion", in Philosophical
Magazine, vol. 33, pp. 485512 (1867).
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In his paper Helmholtz established his three "laws of vortex motion" in much the same
way one finds them in any advanced textbook of fluid mechanics today. This work
established the significance of vorticity to fluid mechanics and science in general.

8. Navier (1785 1836) and Stokes (1819 1903)

Navier

Stokes

In physics, the NavierStokes equations named after Claude-Louis Navier and George
Gabriel Stokes, describe the motion of viscous fluid substances. These balance equations
arise from applying Newton's second law to fluid motion, together with the assumption
that the stress in the fluid is the sum of a diffusing viscous term (proportional to the
gradient of velocity) and a pressure termhence describing viscous flow. The main
difference between them and the simpler Euler equations for inviscid flow is that Navier
Stokes equations also in the Froude limit (no external field) are not conservation
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equations, but rather a dissipative system, in the sense that they cannot be put into the
quasilinear homogeneous form:
NavierStokes equations are useful because they describe the physics of many things of
scientific and engineering interest. They may be used to model the weather, ocean
currents, water flow in a pipe and air flow around a wing. The NavierStokes equations
in their full and simplified forms help with the design of aircraft and cars, the study of
blood flow, the design of power stations, the analysis of pollution, and many other things.
Coupled with Maxwell's equations they can be used to model and study
magnetohydrodynamics

9. Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912)

Reynolds most famously studied the conditions in which the flow of fluid in pipes
transitioned from laminar flow to turbulent flow. From these experiments came the
dimensionless Reynolds number for dynamic similaritythe ratio of inertial forces to
viscous forces. Reynolds also proposed what is now known as Reynolds-averaging of
turbulent flows, where quantities such as velocity are expressed as the sum of mean and
fluctuating components. Such averaging allows for 'bulk' description of turbulent flow,
for example using the Reynolds-averaged NavierStokes equations. Reynolds'
contributions to fluid mechanics were not lost on ship designers ("naval architects").

The ability to make a small scale model of a ship, and extract useful predictive data with
respect to a full size ship, depends directly on the experimentalist applying Reynolds'
turbulence principles to friction drag computations, along with a proper application of
William Froude's theories of gravity wave energy and propagation. Reynolds himself had
a number of papers concerning ship design published in Transactions of the Institution of
Naval Architects.

10. Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953)

Ludwig Prandtl was a German engineer. He was a pioneer in the development of

rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of
aerodynamics, which have come to form the basis of the applied science of aeronautical
engineering. In 1904 he delivered a groundbreaking paper, Fluid Flow in Very Little
Friction, in which he described the boundary layer and its importance for drag and
streamlining. The paper also described flow separation as a result of the boundary layer,
clearly explaining the concept of stall for the first time. Several of his students made
attempts at closed-form solutions, but failed, and in the end the approximation contained
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in his original paper remains in widespread use. He also made specific additions to study
cambered airfoils, like those on World War I aircraft, and published a simplified thinairfoil theory for these designs. This work led to the realization that on any wing of finite
length, wing-tip effects became very important to the overall performance and
characterization of the wing. Considerable work was included on the nature of induced
drag and wingtip vortices, which had previously been ignored. These tools enabled
aircraft designers to make meaningful theoretical studies of their aircraft before they were
built. Prandtl and his student Theodor Meyer developed the first theories of supersonic
shock waves and flow in 1908. The Prandtl-Meyer expansion fans allowed for the
construction of supersonic wind tunnels. He had little time to work on the problem
further until the 1920s, when he worked with Adolf Busemann and created a method for
designing a supersonic nozzle in 1929. Today, all supersonic wind tunnels and rocket
nozzles are designed using the same method. A full development of supersonics would
have to wait for the work of Theodore von Krmn, a student of Prandtl at Gttingen.

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