The Water Tunnel as a Tool in Hydraulic Research

Abstract

The expanding scope of application of the water tunnel is largely the result of war research needs. Since the first known elementary water tunnel was used by Parsons in England in 1898 to investigate propellers, its application has remained primarily in the field of ship propeller testing. Meanwhile, investigations of other submerged bodies and of most fundamental phenomena in fluid dynamics have been performed in the many wind tunnels throughout the world. Even the broad development in hydraulic laboratory techniques that accompanied the revival of interest in scientific hydraulic research during the last twenty-five years did not emphasize the water tunnel as a general tool. In the early stages of World War II, however, there was a shortage of equipment in America, and apparently also abroad, to supply information for underwater ballistics design. Additional facilities in which flow could be produced with cavitation, as well as without, were needed, and these preferably of a type suitable to more general application than the existing propeller tunnels. As a result, there exists now, in addition to propeller testing tunnels, a limited number of water tunnels whose prime purpose is the investigation of flow about bodies in general. Two of these are in the United States, one at the University of Iowa, and one at the California Institute of Technology. This new practice with its additional techniques extends the role the water tunnel is destined to play in hydraulic research. Thus in the current period of reconversion, which applies to research objectives as well as production objectives, a discussion of the present development of water-tunnel equipment and the possible scope of its application in peacetime is appropriate.

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