Review of Fluid Mechanics, Hydraulics, Hydrology and Water Resources for Civil Engineers by Amithirigala Widhanelage Jayawardena

Fluid Mechanics, Hydraulics, Hydrology, and Water Resources for Civil Engineers is an 854-page tome that covers almost everything that an undergraduate student in civil engineering who wishes to specialize in water resources engineering should study. It is also a great resource for practicing engineers. The book comprises 41 chapters, each reflecting decades of teaching experience and scholarship of the author.

Chapter 1 sets the stage about the importance of water and fluid mechanics borrowing from examples of the movement of fluids in everyday life, such as blood flow, water flow, and wind flow. It also provides a few basic definitions to help students extend their knowledge base beyond what they have learned in high school physics to help them understand the more sophisticated concepts that follow.

Chapter 2 is very interesting and is not something that students often encounter in a regular college textbook. It provides a chronological description of the major developments in water science, starting from circa 6,000 BCE, and explains how mathematicians, physicists, earth scientists, and engineers have shaped our knowledge and understanding of hydrology and hydraulics. It also includes a list of important figures and their contributions to the field.

Chapters 3–16 focus on classical topics in fluid mechanics including fluid statics and kinematics, governing equations in fluid motion, ideal fluid flow, viscous fluid flow, dimensional analysis, fluid flow measurements, pipe flow and networks, fluid machinery, turbulence and turbulence modeling, and computational fluid mechanics. Chapters 17–24 are dedicated to topics in hydraulics, including flow in open channels, alluvial channels, channel stability, sediment transport and deposition, and environmental hydraulics, and concludes with a presentation of major hydraulics structures around the world.

Chapters 25–38 are devoted to hydrology. They start with a description of the hydrological cycle and extend into hydrometeorology and then treat each component of the hydrological cycle in a separate chapter. The rest of this section discusses rainfall-runoff modeling, flood routing, flow through saturated porous media, statistical methods in hydrology, systems theory, and time series analysis and forecasting. The last section of the book (Chapters 39–41) is devoted to water resources planning and management.

Professor Jayawardena covers each chapter with extensive detail, clearly explaining every concept, and, where relevant, providing pertinent examples. The chapters include a wealth of information, reflecting the author’s extensive experience and attention to detail. Each is systematically organized, guiding the reader from simple concepts to more complex ones. Most chapters include a set of references—a mix of classical and recent papers—and, where relevant, a set of websites to help the reader. One thing that is lacking in the book, though, is a set of end-of-chapter problems. Inclusion of practice problems would have made this book an excellent textbook for students. We assume that the goal of the author was to compile and share in one place materials that he has prepared or collected over his long and successful career. If that was the case, he has certainly achieved his goal admirably, because the book is well written and organized, and easy to read and understand. It is an excellent reference for students, educators, and practicing civil engineers, and the author deserves a lot of plaudits for writing this treatise.