Brief History of Fluid Mechanics:

The pre-historic achievements in fluid mechanics have been taken

place erratically. The way of fundamental discoveries has been
started steadily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ancient civilization was full of knowledge of solving certain flow
problems like, sailing of ships with oars and irrigation system.
The parallelogram law of vector addition was postulated by
Archimedes and Hero of Alexandria in the third century B. C.
Archimedes (285-212 B. C.) has invented the laws of buoyancy
and applied them to floating and submerged bodies. Sir Isaac
Newton (1642-1727) has postulated his laws of motion and the
law of viscosity of the linear fluids, presently known as
Newtonian Fluid. This theory has brought the assumption of
‘perfect’ or “frictionless fluid”. The eighteenth-century
mathematicians like Bernoulli, Leonard Euler, Jean D’ Alembert,
Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace have obtained
many beautiful solutions of frictionless flow problems. Euler has
developed the differential equations of motion and their
integrated forms too which are now called the Bernoulli’s
equations. The perfect fluid assumptions have limitations in
practical problems. These limitations were overcome by the
invention of the beautiful result known as D’ Alembert’s paradox:
that a body immersed in a frictionless fluid has zero drag. The
engineers began to rely entirely on experiments giving rise to the
development of hydraulics.
 The experimentalists, like Chezy, Pilot, Borda, Weber, Francis,
Hagen, Poiseuille, Darcy, Manning, Bazin and Weisbach have
produced data on flows of open channels, ship resistance, pipe
flows, waves and turbines. Finally, the unification between
experimental hydraulics and theoretical hydrodynamics began at
the end of nineteenth-century. William Froude (1810-1879) and
his son Robert (1846-1924) have developed the laws of model
testing, Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919) has added the technique of
dimensional analysis and Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) has
presented the classic pipe experiment in 1883 showing the
importance of the dimensionless Reynolds number named after
him. The successful addition of the Newtonian viscous terms to
the governing equations of motion by Claude-Louis Navier
(1785-1836) and George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) put another
feather to the viscous-flow theory. Unfortunately, the Navier-
Stokes equations could not provide adequate support for the
analysis of arbitrary flows. But it was the golden moment when
Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953), a German engineer has delivered a
lecture on (On Fluid motion with very small Friction) at the
Heidelberg mathematic Congress in 1904 and has published a
paper which may be called the most important paper on fluid
mechanics ever written.
Prandtl showed that the flow of a fluid with small viscosity (water
or air) past a body can be divided into two regions: a very thin
layer close to the body (boundary layer) where the viscosity is
important and the remaining region outside this layer where the
viscosity can be neglected and the Euler and Bernoulli equations
apply. Boundary layer theory has become the single most
important tool in modern flow analysis. The boundary layer
theory has reduced the mathematical difficulties in the theoretical
treatment of viscous flows and has been proved to be
exceptionally useful and has given considerable stimulation to
research into fluid mechanics since the beginning of twentieth
century. The new theory was developed quickly and soon became
the airfoil theory and gas dynamics- a keystone in modern fluid
mechanics. A series of broad-based experiments by Prandtl along
with his two friendly competitors, Theodore Von n (1881-1963)
and Sir Geoffrey I. Taylor (1886-1975) have built the twentieth-
century foundations for the present state of the art in fluid
mechanics.
 Applications:
Fluid mechanics has traditionally been applied in areas as
 Chemical Engineering.
 Civil Engineering.
 Geophysics.
 Oceanography.

Chemical Engineering:-

It is a branch of engineering that uses principles of chemistry,

physics, mathematics, biology, and economics to efficiently use,
produce, design, transport and transform energy and materials.
The work of chemical engineers can range from the utilisation of
nano-technology and nano-materials in the laboratory to large-
scale industrial processes that convert chemicals, raw materials,
living cells, microorganisms, and energy into useful forms and
products.
Heat transfer and mass transfer in fluids are of interest to
chemical engineers. They must understand fluid mechanics to
design the many different kinds of chemical-processing
equipments.
 Civil Engineering:-

Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that

deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the
physical and naturally built environment, including public works
such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewerage systems,
pipelines, structural components of buildings, and railways. Civil
engineering is traditionally broken into a number of sub-
disciplines. It is considered the second-oldest engineering
discipline after military engineering, and it is defined to
distinguish non-military engineering from military engineering.
Civil engineering takes place in the public sector from municipal
through to national governments, and in the private sector from
individual homeowners through to international companies.
 Geophysics :-

It is a subject of natural science concerned with the physical

processes and physical properties of the Earth and its surrounding
space environment, and the use of quantitative methods for their
analysis. The term geophysics sometimes refers only to the
geological applications: Earth's shape; its gravitational and
magnetic fields; its internal structure and composition; its
dynamics and their surface expression in plate tectonics, the
generation of magmas, volcanism and rock formation. However,
modern geophysics organizations use a broader definition that
includes the water cycle including snow and ice; fluid dynamics
of the oceans and the atmosphere; electricity and magnetism in
the ionosphere and magnetosphere and solar-terrestrial relations;
and analogous problems associated with the Moon and other
planets.