History of the Fluids Engineering Division

Abstract

The 90th Anniversary of the Fluids Engineering Division (FED) of ASME will be celebrated on July 10–14, 2016 in Washington, DC. The venue is ASME's Summer Heat Transfer Conference (SHTC), Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM), and International Conference on Nanochannels and Microchannels (ICNMM). The occasion is an opportune time to celebrate and reflect on the origin of FED and its predecessor—the Hydraulic Division (HYD), which existed from 1926–1963. Therefore, the FED Executive Committee decided that it would be appropriate to publish concurrently a history of the HYD/FED. Accordingly, they commissioned Paul Cooper, C. Samuel Martin, and Timothy O'Hern to prepare this paper, which would document the division's past. A brief work in this direction had appeared in the 2010 FED Newsletter (Morgan, W. B., 2010, Brief History of ASME's Hydraulic/Fluids Engineering Division, Fluids Engineering Division Newsletter, New York, pp. 6–7), and the research by Martin for the present paper had been under way for several years prior to that (Cooper, P., 2010, “History of the FED,” FED Executive Committee at the ASME-CSME Fluids Engineering Summer Conference (FEDSM-2010), Montréal, QC, Canada, Aug., p. 14).