The aim of the fifth edition of Hydraulics in Civil and Environmental Engineering remains to be
to provide comprehensive coverage of civil engineering hydraulics in all its aspects and to provide
an introduction to the principles of environmentally sound hydraulic engineering practice.
To those who would be reading this book for the first time, we hope you enjoy it. You should
find sufficient material to cover most first degree courses and useful information for a higher
degree and for professional practice. The references and further reading lists are comprehensive
and point the way to further study.
The fifth edition has been extensively reviewed by a panel of ten experts drawn from across
the world. It contains much of the material from the previous editions and includes substantive
revisions of the chapters on hydraulic machines, flood hydrology and computational modeling.
New material has also been added to the chapters on hydrostatics, principles of fluid flow, the behavior of real fluids, open channel flow, pressure surge in pipelines, wave theory, sediment
transport, river engineering, and coastal engineering. The latest recommendations regarding
climate change predictions, impacts and adaptation measures have also been included. The
chapter on water quality modeling has been removed to contain the size of the book. References
have been updated throughout.
Hydraulics is a very ancient science. The Egyptians and Babylonians constructed canals, both
for irrigation and for defensive purposes. No attempts were made at that time to understand
the laws of fluid motion. The first notable attempts to rationalize the nature of pressure and
flow patterns were undertaken by the Greeks. The laws of hydrostatics and buoyancy were
enunciated; Ctesibius and Hero designed hydraulic equipment such as the piston pump and
water clock and, of course, there was the Archimedes screw pump. The Romans appear, like the
Egyptians, to have been more interested in the practical and constructional aspects of hydraulics
than in theorizing. Thus, development continued slowly until the time of the Renaissance,
when men such as Leonardo Da Vinci began to publish the results of their observations. Ideas
which emerged then, respecting conservation of mass (continuity of flow), frictional resistance
and the velocity of surface waves, are still in use, though sometimes in a more refined form.
The Italian School became famous for their work. Torricelli et al. observed the behavior of
water jets. They compared the path traced by a free jet with projectile theory and related the
jet velocity to the square root of the pressure generating the flow. Guglielmini et al. published
the results of observations on river flows. The Italians were hydraulicians in the original sense
of the word, i.e., they were primarily empiricists. Up to this point, mathematics had played
no significant part in this sort of scientific work. Indeed, at that time mathematics was largely
confined to the principles of geometry, but this was about to change.
