Following the Water Drop: 60 Years of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

As we move through the 60th year of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, it is a good time to reflect on what has been accomplished over that span. The JHE has become the flagship publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers. It consistently has one of the highest impact factors of all ASCE journals.

These accomplishments are not the work of one or even a few motivated individuals. Instead they are from the collective effort of us all. The authors, reviewers, associate editors, chief editors, and ASCE support staff, both currently and from throughout years, have sacrificed much to establish JHE as a leading multidisciplinary journal for the hydraulics community. The Journal integrates top-notch field, laboratory, and numerical investigations that support not only the fundamental understanding of hydraulics, but also the effective design of the critical infrastructure for this country and globally.

As part of the natural evolution of the ASCE community, JHE has grown from its traditional base of pressurized flows in closed conduits and open-channel flows in rivers, lakes, and estuaries. Presently, the Journal publishes frequently manuscripts on river mechanics, sediment transport, multiphase flows, contaminant transport, environmental fluid mechanics, and heat and gas transfers. It is considered a leading journal for manuscripts describing flow-sediment interactions, as well as flow-structure interactions using advanced numerical techniques, sensor technology, and laboratory and field observations starting from the microeddy scale to the watershed scale. The topics are continuing to grow to include fields of ecohydraulics and geomorphology, like bank erosion and stream restoration. The ability to evolve and address new thematic areas that researchers will face in the years ahead is a trademark of JHE and it must continue.

In honor of the 60th anniversary celebration for JHE, I am very excited to present a series of contributions from some of our more esteemed colleagues. Over the next few issues, you will see eight invited manuscripts that cover several of the topics previously mentioned, which are at the core of JHE. In my mind, this series is the truest means of celebrating JHE’s 60th anniversary because it is your peer-reviewed manuscripts and the science they embody that make JHE what it is.

For this series, we approached researchers, based on input received from several of you over the years. These scientists and engineers were selected in recognition of their seminal research representing the many disciplines of hydraulic engineering and water resources, as well as their widespread vision of their specific field’s past, present, and future. They were charged with the difficult task of either capturing the landmarks of the past and current research or touching on future directions in hydraulic engineering.

These special celebrations do not come around very often, so the contributions can become seminal works in shaping the future of hydraulic engineering over the next decade. The eight papers in this series, which have been further strengthened by a thorough peer review, will set new bars for our community. Here, I am providing just a brief introduction to whet your appetite. We have in this series review papers exploring some of the more traditional topics in JHE, namely turbulence, scour, and flow-channel morphology interactions. The series also has more methods-based reviews, as well as smaller case studies from the numerical and field perspectives. Finally, the series turns more philosophical, looking at what is needed from future scientists and engineers as we push through the 21st century.

One of the review papers is from Wolfgang Rodi, professor emeriti in the Civil Engineering Department at Karlsruhe University. His manuscript offers a historical review of the methods for simulating turbulence and its effects in hydraulic flows. He presents such methods as empirical relationships, Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations, direct numerical simulations, and large-eddy simulations.

Another review paper is from Rob Ettema, the Harold Short endowed chair at Colorado State University, and co-authored by George Constantinescu and Bruce Melville. The manuscript reflects back 60 years to Laursen and Toch’s milestone publication on pier scour. Back then pier flow fields were thought to be too complex to even visualize, let alone measure, that is until the development of the hot-film anemometer. The manuscript also discusses a contemporary approach to estimating scour depth using semiempirical formulae, experiments with state-of-the-art instruments, and computational fluid dynamics. The approach offers a sense of design-method practicality to pier flow-field complexity.

Professor Ana Maria da Silva of Queen’s College, in her review paper, focuses on the question of why, in the absence of geological constraints, some streams tend to remain regular in plan shape. It looks to the nature of meandering flow and its coupling to bed and bank deformation to address it. The work suggests that differences in the erodibility of the bed and banks may be a significant contributing factor to the planimetric fate of the stream.

The series continues with more methods-based reviews. Vincenzo Armenio from the Università di Trieste, Italy discusses the use of large eddy simulation (LES) in hydraulic engineering. He uses a handful studies to present the different applications of LES, from turbulence in the presence of longitudinal bars and local scours to studies of Lagrangian and Eulerian dispersion processes. Dr. Armenio offers a new viewpoint to the benefits of LES by considering it as numerical experiment, carried out using millions of nonintrusive sensors. Moving to the field, Dieter Rickenmann at the Swiss Federal Research Institute reviews the more widely used bedload surrogate acoustic measuring techniques that were tested both in flume experiments and in field settings to look at total bedload fluxes. Some studies examined how far findings from flume experiments can be quantitatively transferred and applied to field sites for which independent, direct calibration measurements exist.

A couple of smaller case studies in the series include one from myself on examining the development of the scour hole around a barb. I present some of the detailed flume experiments performed by my team, coupled with some numerical simulations. Additionally, Paola Passalacqua at the University of Texas discusses the transition from confined to unconfined flow in the Wax Lake Delta of coastal Louisiana in her manuscript, coauthored with Matt Hiatt. The transition between confined and unconfined flow in coastal river deltas has a significant impact on the flow hydraulics and the resulting transport dynamics of solids and solutes. The manuscript looks at a combination of the effects from the role of vegetation, topography, and river discharge fluctuations.

The final paper is from Pierre Julien, the 2015 Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering award winner. Professor Julien calls for the need to balance facts and knowledge with imagination and creativity as our hydraulics research progresses. We need to embrace more physically based computer models, and think outside the more traditional black box. Our future experimental research should also work to capture a deeper physical understanding of our surroundings. As we move forward we must continue to push the envelope of hydraulics research.

In summary, we have a robust series to celebrate our 60th anniversary. As they start to roll out in the coming months, please take a chance to review them yourself.