Hydraulic Expertise Research Articles

Physical-Model-Based Assessment of Reduction of Hydraulic Forces Acting on Channel Bed through Advanced Energy Dissipator Design

The hydraulic engineering designers focus on shaping up the flow regime so that the greatest energy dissipation is ensured. On the other hand, the structural designers focus on load bearing capacity and durability of the structural components which may contradict the focus of the hydraulic experts. Such a case may occur when the spillway chute floor slab must be thin due to the limited spaces. Then, the dynamic load acting on the chute floor slab may compromise its long-term operation. The dynamic forces are created by the violent turbulences which may even coincide with the natural frequency of the reinforced concrete floor slab. Therefore, the objective of this paper is a complex approach to small-scale physical model testing which makes use of the latest rapid-prototyping techniques and the particle image velocimetry, and which in the end allows to estimate the magnitude of the dynamic hydraulic forces acting on the channel bed. The newly developed organic-shape energy dissipators play a key role in reducing the kinetic energy of water through its enhances aeration. The proposed method on a small scale can assist favorably the design process of real-scale hydraulic reinforced concrete structures.

Modeling of GPM and LPM in Centrifugal Pump for Obtaining Hydraulic Flow Pattern Types

The types of hydraulic flow patterns in laboratory testing through the use of physical modeling tools often encounter several challenges when confronted with the use of empirical model scales, namely, the issue of scale. Water structures in the horizontal dimension do not experience highly complex issues because there are many measuring instruments available, whether self-made, home industry-produced, or industrial-grade. The presence of water volume in storage can only be tested at a clear scale, especially when it is already within a water tower (reservoir) installation with a specific height. Determining the need for water storage in a water tower is not an easy task to calculate due to differences in height, diameter, and storage capacity. Hydraulic experts often overlook these differences, which can become a problem when there is a demand for the volume of water during peak flow conditions. The solution to this issue needs to be verified by conducting model tests using a device known as the Centrifugal Pump, which has not been previously explored for laboratory research. GPM LPM model tests on this device make use of instruments and numerous pressure measuring tools supplied with pressurized water by a pump at specific, measurable volumes. To analyze the flow rate, flow coefficients, flow velocity, Reynolds number, Froude number, and test results with various speeds (speed meter), researchers test and measure the capacity of GPM LPM for each valve opening, starting with openings of 0.5, 0.75, 1.00, reading the instruments, shifting the speed from 1, 2, 3, 4, up to the highest speed, which is 12. A graph is created to display the test results of the GPM LPM speed booster device, which contains an electric motor. The test is conducted with three repetitions for each valve opening, and the speed and travel time values from the instruments on the test device are recorded and mapped. Subsequently, the analysis results of the GPM LPM test are recommended to provide information to construction planners of water structures. These results show that, under specific conditions of different speeds and valve openings, there are variations in the volume and travel time values. This information can be applied to determine the required storage capacity for each water tower building with a hydraulic flow pattern based on Reynolds number (Re) and Froude number (Fr).

Modeling of High Pressure Loss (Head Loss) in a Flow Measurement Unit with Various Pipe Network Manifold Openings

The head loss in water flowing through pipes often turns out to be different from what we assume, which is the occurrence of incompressible flow. However, this assumption is not always true because the flow pattern inside the pipe is not visible and can only be measured with precise equipment. The presence of water in the pipes can only be tested on a clear scale, especially when it is part of the network within a multi-story building. Determining the need for a pipe network within a building is not an easy calculation due to differences in length, diameter, and bends. Hydraulic experts often overlook these differences, which can become a problem when clogs occur during the flow process. To find a solution to this problem, it is necessary to conduct tests using a device called a Water Measurement Unit. This is rarely done in laboratories. Testing the water pressure with this device requires various instruments and a variety of valve openings supplied with pressurized water by a pump at a certain capacity. To analyze the flow rates resulting from the tests with different valve openings, researchers test and measure the flow rate capacity for each opening, starting with openings of 0.5, 0.75, 1.00, and so on. They read the instrument, move the copper from one height to another, and create a graph of the test results in the form of a pair of connectors. The researchers test the device and its openings three times for each opening, recording and mapping the pressure values and the time it takes on the measuring instrument. Subsequently, the results of the pressure test (Head Loss) are recommended to provide information to water pipe installation planners that the test results with various valve openings under certain conditions have different pressure values and travel times. It turns out that in the placement of hose or copper number 2, stability is observed with pressure, and there is no significant differential pressure increase. In the experiment with hose or copper number 2, it can be said that everything is stable enough to conclude that there is no head loss, and it is recommended to be safe for modeling.

Civilizing the Past: Egyptian Irrigation in the Colonial Imagination

Abstract Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” as a uniquely deleterious contribution to the study of ancient water management. His errors notwithstanding, this article argues that the ideological misshaping of Western scholarship on irrigation instead emerged from Egypt’s long colonial experience. First articulated in the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte, the theory of a centralized, ancient Egyptian “hydraulic state” was crafted to justify French attempts to reshape Egypt’s irrigated landscape. British hydraulic engineers later received and refined this narrative during the British colonial period. Their popularizing discourse retrojected the technocratic character of modern irrigation into antiquity, defining the Egyptian “irrigation system” as a static and unchanging fusion of hydraulic expertise and state power. Widely disseminated in specialist and popular fora, this tendentious argument had become received wisdom by the beginning of the twentieth century and subtly shaped early Egyptological descriptions of irrigation in antiquity.

Building hydrosocialism in Czechoslovakia

Abstract Throughout the period of state socialism, water was viewed as an instrument of immense transformative power and water experts were seen as guardians of such transformation, a transformation for which we coin the term ‘hydrosocialism’. A reconfiguration of water, a scarce and vital natural resource, was to a great extent identified with social change and envisioned transition to socialist and eventually communist society. While in the West, hydraulic experts (hydrocrats) and the vision of a ‘civilising mission’ of water management (hydraulic mission) gradually faded away with the arrival of reflexive modernity from the 1960s, in socialist Czechoslovakia the situation was different. Despite the fact they faced analogous challenges (environmental issues, economisation), the technocratic character of state socialism enabled socialist hydraulic engineers to secure their position and belief in transformative powers of water.

Agua, tecnología y gubernamentalidad:

Historically, mega-dams have been imagined and built by hydraulic experts to govern and allocate water. Although these dams have some important benefits, their positive effects are often highly overrated while their socio-environmental and economic impacts on local populations are fairly underestimated. Despite this, in many Andean countries the construction of such projects is being resumed as indispensable and unfailing. Mega-dams are promoted by self-defined left-wing progressive governments as modern ways of water governance, closely related to development, buen vivir and wellbeing discourses. This article shows through the Chone multipurpose mega-dam in coastal Ecuador, the discursive use of technology that is involved in its construction and implementation process. It furthermore analyzes and shows that these water technologies not only inflict material changes, but also social, cultural and agro-productive territorial transformations. The article concludes that megadams should be understood as powerful governmentality tools since they are imposed not only by coercive forms of power, but also through more inclusive forms that justify and legitimize their development.

Imperial cooperation at the margins of Europe: the European Commission of the Danube, 1856–65

This article deals with the work of the European Commission of the Danube (ECD) during the first two decades of its activity in the aftermath of the Crimean War. It focuses on the early stage formation of international organizations in the mid-nineteenth century when river commissions were the first organizations that issued supranational regulations and had their own bureaucracies. In this context, I argue that the ECD became a testing ground for new types of inter-imperial cooperation. First, the ECD became a site where hydraulic expertise from all over Europe was gathered and analysed. As a consequence, this exchange among the representatives of different empires and of different sub-fields of expertise generated new technical knowledge and made the ECD a space for cross-imperial knowledge production. Second, in 1865, the ECD adopted a Public Act that codified navigation rules in the Danube Delta. These regulations were among the first upholding a supranational settlement. Furthermore, the document exemplifies how such a supranational agreement was implemented through a joint imperial intervention against the authority of the Ottoman Empire, the only territorial power.

Engineering Empire

This essay examines hydraulic engineers in Central Asia under tsarist rule and their participation in processes of agricultural expansion and empire-building in the imperial province of Turkestan. This province theoretically provided the perfect space in which Russians, who continually worried about their own “backwardness” in relation to Europe, could demonstrate their ability to be a colonial power on par with European empires, yet the lack of an understanding of irrigation engineering and the difficulties of irrigating arid regions threatened to jeopardize Russia’s efforts at a “civilizing mission.” Still, a growing group of Russian technical specialists was able to participate in scientific dialogue and transnational technological exchanges with other hydraulic engineers in other parts of the world who were similarly enthusiastic about the potential of science and technology to create a more modern future in the Russian Central Asian borderlands. Ultimately, however, even though the zeal of these Russian and foreign hydraulic experts coincided with Russian political ambitions in Turkestan, the political realities of the tsarist government’s position in the region would determine the fate of their grand visions for transformation.

From hydroimperialism to hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ hydraulics in France, North Africa, and beyond

This article examines hydroimperialism and the subsequent emergence of hydrocapitalism in 19th- and 20th-century France and beyond. As the terms themselves suggest, both forms of ‘hydropower’ illustrate the fundamental connection between water, its management, and colonial or neocolonial relations in the modern era. The article develops the concepts of hydroimperialism and hydrocapitalism both historically and analytically. It examines some of the historical processes that fostered and shaped French hydroimperialism during the colonial era, with French North Africa serving as the empirical example. It also explores how French political and technical elites basically advocated hydroimperialism, often from France to its North African empire, but also from the colonies to the metropole. Obscuring these earlier mobilities and exchanges, French water specialists in the late 20th century have pushed for the export of their hydraulic expertise ‘globally’. Finally, although this study of hydroimperialism and hydrocapitalism is based on historical sources and methods, and their particular forms are thus situated in France, French North Africa, and parts of the global South, these concepts are analytically flexible. They facilitate historical comparisons while also helping to theorize the mutual constitution of science and technology, environmental management, and power in the modern world.

Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb, are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

Hydrology and hydraulics expertise in participatory processes for climate change adaptation in the Dutch Meuse

Many scientists feel that scientific outcomes are not sufficiently taken into account in policy-making. The research reported in this paper shows what happens with scientific information during such a process. In 2001 the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management commissioned their regional office in Limburg to assess how flood management objectives could be achieved in future in the Dutch Meuse valley, assuming climate change will increase peak discharges. To ensure political support, regional discussion rounds were to help assess the measures previously identified. This paper discusses the ways in which hydrological and hydraulic expertise was input, understood and used in this assessment process. Project participants as a group had no trouble contesting assumptions and outcomes. Nevertheless, water expertise was generally accepted as providing facts, once basic choices such as starting situation had been discussed and agreed. The technical constraints determined that politically unacceptable measures would have to be selected to achieve the legally binding flood management objective. As a result, no additional space will be set aside for future flood management beyond the already reserved floodplain. In this case, political arguments clearly prevail over policy objectives, with hydraulic expertise providing decisive arbitration between the two.

Parker acquires composites technology

A combination of light weight carbon fibre composites technology and the hydraulic expertise of Parker Hannifin are anticipated to yield new energy saving solutions.

Hydraulic Performances of Minimum Energy Loss Culverts in Australia

Culverts are among the most common hydraulic structures. Modern designs do not differ from ancient structures and are often characterized by significant afflux at the design flows. A significant advance was the development of the minimum energy loss (MEL) culverts in the late 1950s. The design technique allows a drastic reduction in the upstream flooding associated with lower costs. The development and operational performances of this type of structure is presented. The successful operation of MEL culverts for more than 40 years is documented with first-hand records during and after floods. The experiences demonstrate the design soundness, while highlighting the importance of the hydraulic expertise of the design engineers.