Abstract
This research was started in 2019 for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death. Our Italian-French research group focused its attention on a famous drawing by da Vinci in which a water jet impacts on a pool (RCIN 912660 The Windsor Collection). This particular drawing has often been used by many fluid dynamicists as the first important document concerning turbulent flows. It is worth noting that the word “turbulence,” one of the most important phenomena in fluid dynamics, was used for the first time by da Vinci in the “Atlantic codex.” After a detailed study of different historical documents, we sought to reproduce the flow drawn in the sheet RCIN 912660 using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics model in order to better analyze the different descriptions that Leonardo reported beside his drawing.
Highlights
Water flows obsessed Leonardo throughout his life (1452–1519)
Our Italian-French research group focused its attention on a famous drawing by da Vinci in which a water jet impacts on a pool (RCIN 912660 The Windsor Collection)
After a detailed study of different historical documents, we sought to reproduce the flow drawn in the sheet RCIN 912660 using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics model in order to better analyze the different descriptions that Leonardo reported beside his drawing
Summary
Water flows obsessed Leonardo throughout his life (1452–1519). In the years between 1508 and 1511, he studied hydraulics in great detail with the unrealized intention of compiling a treatise on the subject. This study started after a 15-year Italian-French collaboration between our two research groups, respectively, the CNR-INM in Italy and the Ecole Centrale Nantes (ECN) in France Both groups are involved in the study of free-surface flows and develop numerical models for the investigation of such kinds of flow. Leonardo represented the intrinsic three-dimensional (3D) nature of this turbulent flow with the idea that it consisted of a set of coexisting eddies ranging in scale from large to small This concept was formalized mathematically 400 years later in 1941 by Kolmogorov and is known as the “cascade model of turbulence.”. Historians have shown that by systematically drawing phenomena and parts of the phenomena he was observing, Leonardo was able to analyze these phenomena in detail and even extract rational explanations for them In this sense, his pictural analysis method was a prelude to the Galilean scientific method, which came about one century later.. Using our best results, we performed a comparison of the numerical simulations to what was depicted and commented on by Leonardo in his drawing
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
