Pipe flow: a gateway to turbulence
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Pipe flow: a gateway to turbulence
zbMATH Open document ID: 1471.76006
author: Michael Eckert
published in: Archive for History of Exact Sciences
publication date: 2021-06-03T00:00:00Z
review text: The author gives a concise and illuminating history of the scientific study of pipe flow (both air and water), focusing at first on a succession of formulas for determining the pressure loss per pipe length and on the varied engineering contexts from which they emerged, beginning with the construction of the Versailles waterworks in the late 17th century. With the establishment of empirically successful formulas for both laminar (Hagen-Poiseuille law) and turbulent (Blasius's law) flow, the focus shifts to the study of the laminar-turbulent transition and the attempts to obtain a theoretical derivation for the law of turbulent flow by Ludwig Prandtl and his student Theodore von Kármán in the early twentieth century. Pipe flow is thus identified as a central empirical gateway to the study of turbulence, highlighting the origins of turbulence research in applied engineering concerns. The author describes how Prandtl, von Kármán, and another Prandtl student, Johann Nikuradse, an expert for pipe flow measurements, obtained a first theoretical framework for turbulent flow. The paper ends with an outlook on later developments.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 76-03
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A45
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A55
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A60
zbMATH DE Number: 7354701
reviewed by: A. S. Blum
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: s00407-020-00263-y
OpenAlex ID: W3091264075
cites work: Prandtl and the Göttingen school
cites work: Q5710172
cites work: Turbulence Research in the 1920s and 1930s between Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering
cites work: Transition to turbulence in shear flows
cites work: Turbulence transition in pipe flow
cites work: Q5526850
cites work: Osborne Reynolds and the publication of his papers on turbulent flow
cites work: Recent progress in understanding the transition to turbulence in a pipe
cites work: Progress in pipe and channel flow turbulence, 1961–2011
cites work: Osborne Reynolds: a turbulent life
cites work: Theodore von Kármán
cites work: Experimental Studies of Transition to Turbulence in a Pipe
cites work: Q3282525
cites work: Q4187448
cites work: Q3263988
cites work: Saph and Schoder and the Friction Law of Blasius
cites work: A direct numerical simulation study on the mean velocity characteristics in turbulent pipe flow
cites work: Mean-flow scaling of turbulent pipe flow
DOI: 10.1007/S00407-020-00263-Y
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 7354701