Hydraulic engineering
Hydraulic engineering is the application of the principles of fluid mechanics to problems dealing with the collection, storage, control, transport, regulation, measurement, and use of water.
The hydraulic engineer is concerned with the transport of sediment by the river, the interaction of the water with its alluvial boundary, and the occurrence of scour and deposition.
[1] "The hydraulic engineer actually develops conceptual designs for the various features which interact with water such as spillways and outlet works for dams, culverts for highways, canals and related structures for irrigation projects, and cooling-water facilities for thermal power plants.
The flow outside the boundary layer is free of shear and viscous-related forces so it is assumed to act as an ideal fluid.
In the Archaic epoch of the Philippines, hydraulic engineering also developed specially in the Island of Luzon, the Ifugaos of the mountainous region of the Cordilleras built irrigations, dams and hydraulic works and the famous Banaue Rice Terraces as a way for assisting in growing crops around 1000 BC.
Hydraulic engineering was highly developed in Europe under the aegis of the Roman Empire where it was especially applied to the construction and maintenance of aqueducts to supply water to and remove sewage from their cities.
The rulers developed new systems for agriculture and taxation, which continued to be used in parts of the Horn of Africa as late as the 19th century.
However, it was in the medieval Islamic lands where the technological complex was assembled and standardized, and subsequently diffused to the rest of the Old World.
The various components of this complex included canals, dams, the qanat system from Persia, regional water-lifting devices such as the noria, shaduf and screwpump from Egypt, and the windmill from Islamic Afghanistan.
Liquids are still moved for the most part by gravity through systems of canals and aqueducts, though the supply reservoirs may now be filled using pumps.
For example, without the efforts of people like William Mulholland the Los Angeles area would not have been able to grow as it has because it simply does not have enough local water to support its population.
In much the same way, the central valley of California could not have become such an important agricultural region without effective water management and distribution for irrigation.
In a somewhat parallel way to what happened in California, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) brought work and prosperity to the South by building dams to generate cheap electricity and control flooding in the region, making rivers navigable and generally modernizing life in the region.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) performed experiments, investigated and speculated on waves and jets, eddies and streamlining.
[3] Late in the 19th century, the importance of dimensionless numbers and their relationship to turbulence was recognized, and dimensional analysis was born.
[21] The modern hydraulic engineer uses the same kinds of computer-aided design (CAD) tools as many of the other engineering disciplines while also making use of technologies like computational fluid dynamics to perform the calculations to accurately predict flow characteristics, GPS mapping to assist in locating the best paths for installing a system and laser-based surveying tools to aid in the actual construction of a system.
