Henry Darcy (1803–1858): Immortalised by his scientific legacy

Abstract

Darcy’s Law is the fundamental equation describing the flow of fluid through porous media including groundwater. It forms the quantitative basis of many science and engineering disciplines including hydrology, hydrogeology, soil science, civil engineering, petroleum engineering and chemical engineering. The year 2006 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry Darcy’s most famous text Les Fontaines Publiques de la Ville de Dijon (The Public Fountains of the City of Dijon; Darcy 1856). Buried in its depths was Note D, an appendix that contained the famous sand column experiments and the discovery of Darcy’s Law–a discovery that marked the birth of quantitative hydrogeology. This article describes the many contributions Darcy made to hydraulics, including Darcy’s Law. But what many hydrogeologists may not realise is that Darcy made other contributions to science and engineering that are possibly less familiar. He was the first to describe aquifer resistance, he furnished the very first evidence of the fluid boundary layer, he made major contributions to pipe hydraulics as evidenced by the joint naming of the commonly used Darcy-Weisbach pipe friction equation, he clearly understood the nature of laminar/turbulent flow regimes and recognised the similarity of his law to Poiseuille flow. Many of these experimental observations were facilitated by improvements Darcy made to the Pitot tube that both yielded its modern design and allowed for more accurate measurements of the pipe fluid flow velocity distribution. Finally, not only did Darcy discover Darcy’s Law, he was the first to combine it with continuity to develop the falling head permeameter solution that is still used today. He also applied that unsteady solution to the analysis of spring discharge. Whilst Darcy is immortalised by Darcy’s Law, it is clear that his scientific legacy extends beyond it. Darcy’s contributions to engineering science are described in this article. A brief historical account of Darcy’s life is provided in order to place them within the necessary critical historical context and to provide some accompanying insights on Darcy’s life, personality and motivations. A detailed description of Darcy’s contributions to science and engineering is then presented. A number of excellent papers written recently by Brown (2002a, 2002b, 2003) form the basis for this analysis. Finally, a brief discussion of hydrogeology in the post-Darcy years shows that Darcy’s Law was applied almost immediately after its discovery to the problem of radial flow to a well, first treated by Dupuit (1863). It is here that Darcy’s Law was first applied to a hydrogeologic problem that resembles a modern day aquifer analysis. The use of Darcy’s Law in formalising the foundations for modern day quantitative hydrogeology is also described. It is shown how these early fundamental contributions followed as either a direct consequence of Darcy’s Law or the immediate application of it.