Turbulence is a research field where high expectations have met with recurrent frustration. It is a common perception among physicists, mathematicians and engineers that there is a "big mystery" behind the phenomenon of turbulence. Its history has also remained anything but well researched. Unlike topics such as quantum theory, which began to attract physics historians as long as fifty years ago, turbulence has - until now - received only little professional historical investigation.
In this book, which complements his earlier SpringerBrief "The Turbulence Problem", the author sketches the history of turbulence from the vantage point of its roots (Part I), the basic concepts (Part II) and the formation of a scientific community that regarded turbulence as a research field in its own right (Part III). From this perspective turbulence research appears to undertake an odyssey through uncharted territories. The book follows this development up until a conference in Marseille in the year 1961, which marked the inauguration of turbulence in the words of its organizer as “a new science”. The epilogue contains some observations about turbulence research since 1961. This book provides a rich source of information for all those interested in the history of this major field of basic and applied science.
Author(s): Michael Eckert
Series: History of Physics
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 224
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Acronyms
Part I Roots
1 Pipe Flow
1.1 The Conduits at Versailles
1.2 Pipe Flow Accounts in the Late 18th Century
1.3 Early Pipe Flow Formulae
1.4 Air Flow in Long Conduits of Pipes
1.5 The Darcy-Weisbach Equation
1.6 The Riddle of Two Different Manners of Flow
1.7 Blasius' Law for Turbulent Pipe Friction
2 Channel Flow
2.1 Water Management in Early Modern Italy
2.2 Chézy's Formula
2.3 Precise Channel Flow Measurements
2.4 Boussinesq's Friction Coefficient ε
2.5 Onset of Channel Flow Turbulence
3 Drag
3.1 Hog's Bladders in St. Paul's Cathedral
3.2 Water Wheels and Wind Mills
3.3 Ballistics
3.4 Towing Ships
3.5 Drag Measurements in the Wind Tunnel
4 Wind and Weather
4.1 Erratic Winds
4.2 The Physics of Atmospheric Flows
4.3 How Turbulence Became a Meteorological Agency
4.4 Experiencing Turbulence in World War I
Part II Concepts
5 The Boundary Layer Concept
5.1 Before Prandtl
5.2 The Genesis of Prandtl's Boundary Layer Concept
5.3 Flow Detachment from Cylinders
5.4 The Turbulent Boundary Layer
5.5 The Turbulence Problem—as Perceived in the Early 1920s
6 The Mixing Length
6.1 The Eddy Viscosity—A Key to Turbulence
6.2 Prandtl's Mixing Length Approach
6.3 Kármán's Similarity Approach
6.4 Taylor's Vorticity Transport Concept
7 The Statistical Theory of Turbulence
7.1 Correlation Functions as Characteristics of Turbulent Flow
7.2 Wind Tunnel Turbulence
7.3 Taylor's Statistical Theory of Turbulence
7.4 The Kármán–Howarth Theory
7.5 K41
8 The Onset of Turbulence
8.1 Heisenberg's Doctoral Work
8.2 The Tollmien–Schlichting Instability
8.3 Disputes on Hydrodynamical Stability
8.4 A Kind of Boundary Layer ``Flutter''
Part III Staging Turbulence
9 The Rise of Applied Mechanics
9.1 Turbulence Research Without a Common Label
9.2 Scientific Engineering
9.3 The International Congresses for Applied Mechanics
10 Turbulence in WW II
10.1 Wartime Reports
10.2 Fundamental Research on Turbulence During the War
11 Postwar Revelation and Reorganization
11.1 Disclosing Wartime Achievements
11.2 IUTAM
11.3 The Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society
12 Turbulence in the 1950s
12.1 The First Textbooks on Turbulence
12.2 New Journals
12.3 Transgressing Disciplinary Boundaries
13 Marseille '61
13.1 Turbulence—``A New Science''
13.2 Turbulent Diffusion
13.3 Homogeneous Turbulence
13.4 Enter Kolmogorov
13.5 Jets, Wakes, Wall-Bounded and Other Turbulent Flows
14 Epilog
Appendix References
Index
