Review of Constructions Hydrauliques by Willi H. Hager and Anton J. Schleiss: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, Lausanne, Switzerland; 2009; ISBN 978-2-88074-746-6; 616 pp. Price: approx. $125.00.

This is a new edition of the 15th volume of Traité de Génie Civil de Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a series of 25 civil engineering textbooks. Four of the books in the series cover hydraulic engineering subjects, and the companion titles are on hydrodynamics, fluvial hydraulics, and dams. The series has been developed to assist practitioners and engineering students at the B.S. and M.S. levels. The topic of hydraulic constructions is particularly difficult to master since it involves solids, water, and air. The main topics covered in this volume include flow in pipes, open channels, spillways, and energy dissipation. The new edition has been expanded to include recent developments in the field.

This book is written in French and comprises five main sections approximately translated as follows. Section 1 reviews the fundamentals, head losses in pipes and open channels as well as backwater curves. Section 2 covers different types of spillways, with and without gates. Section 3 focuses on prismatic and nonprismatic channels as well as air entrainment on spillways. Section 4 covers dissipation of energy through rapid expansions and hydraulic jumps. Section 5 guides the reader through the design of water intakes and sluices. Each section is comprehensive and includes several fully developed chapters with concise text, definition sketches, governing equations, experimental results, design drawings, and numerous photos. Each chapter has a set of solved calculation examples, relevant references, and a notation list. The book is well illustrated to the extent that very few pages do not have sketches, diagrams, and/or photos, and the material can be useful to a broader international audience.

One of the most attractive features of this book is the detailed information on large hydraulic structures. Numerous hydraulic structures, particularly spillways, are analyzed in a comprehensive manner with definition sketches, relevant equations, appropriate graphs, calculation examples, relevant information on engineering design, and appropriate references. The book has been updated with coverage of interesting new topics, such as resistance to flow in vegetated channels, labyrinth and piano key (PK) weirs, and sediment sluices. Many of the photos in this book are phenomenal. They include pictures of flow on the emergency spillway at Tarbela Dam in Pakistan, the tunnel of Glen Canyon Dam in the United States, the Restitucion Spillway in Peru, and the La Grande 2 Stepped Spillway at James Bay in Québec, Canada. The authors also display a large collection of photos from laboratory experiments, including from tests on hydraulic jumps and energy dissipation structures. Complex subjects, such as vortices near water intakes and spillways, are also discussed with useful illustrations and academic insight. This is perhaps the most significant and detailed text on the classical analysis and design of hydraulic structures on the market at this time.

Probing into some relatively minor details, it was not clear how the “coursiers” discussed in Section 3 differ from the “déversoirs” discussed in Section 2. The presentation of the fundamentals may not be as straightforward as expected. Some elementary concepts have been divided among the first chapter and appendixes 2, 3, and 4. The bio-sketches in appendix 1 seem to relate more to contributions to hydrodynamics than to hydraulic structures. The treatment of the Manning equation is also particularly odd: the widely used Manning roughness coefficient $n$ has been replaced with a coefficient $1∕K$ . It turns out that the new $K$ factor is a measure of conveyance rather than roughness.

The book is printed on heavy paper, and given its quality, the hardcover should last well beyond the school years. The cost and weight of this book may be on the heavy side for students, but it is affordable for professional engineers.

In summary, this book is a wonderful digest of the state-of-the-art for hydraulic structures. It will beyond any doubt inspire young engineering students to become excellent design engineers.