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The 90th Anniversary of the Fluids Engineering Division (FED) of ASME will be celebrated on July 10–14, 2016 in Washington, DC. The venue is ASME's Summer Heat Transfer Conference (SHTC), Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM), and International Conference on Nanochannels and Microchannels (ICNMM). The occasion is an opportune time to celebrate and reflect on the origin of FED and its predecessor—the Hydraulic Division (HYD), which existed from 1926–1963. Therefore, the FED Executive Committee decided that it would be appropriate to publish concurrently a history of the HYD/FED. Accordingly, they commissioned Paul Cooper, C. Samuel Martin, and Timothy O'Hern to prepare this paper, which would document the division's past. A brief work in this direction had appeared in the 2010 FED Newsletter (Morgan, W. B., 2010, Brief History of ASME's Hydraulic/Fluids Engineering Division, Fluids Engineering Division Newsletter, New York, pp. 6–7), and the research by Martin for the present paper had been under way for several years prior to that (Cooper, P., 2010, “History of the FED,” FED Executive Committee at the ASME-CSME Fluids Engineering Summer Conference (FEDSM-2010), Montréal, QC, Canada, Aug., p. 14).

This paper describes the relationship between hydraulic losses and secondary flow within sinuous conduits with complicated bends. It has been found that the nature of secondary flow present in the bends is quite sensitive to the geometric configuration of the bend and the actual aspect ratio of the conduit section. Indeed, many different secondary flow patterns have been found to exist as the bend geometry is altered. A wide range of experiments has been conducted for various aspect ratios of a rectangular conduit with different curvatures.

Flow of a gas-liquid mixture in a piping system may be treated as a pseudo-fluid flow if the mixture is homogeneous and the void fraction is small. The governing equations for such flows are a set of nonlinear partial differential equations with pressure dependent coefficients. Shocks may be produced during transient state conditions. For numerical integration of these equations, two second-order explicit finite-difference schemes are introduced. To verify validity of the computed results, they are compared with the experimental results.

The diagnostic facilities of the cross power spectrum and the coherence function have been employed to enhance the identification of not only the inception of cavitation, but also its level. Two piezoelectric pressure transducers placed in the downstream chamber of a model spool valve undergoing various levels of cavitation allowed for the use of both functions—the phase angle of the complex cross spectrum and the dimensionless coherence function—to sense clearly the difference between noise levels associated with a noncavitating jet from those once cavitation inception is attained. The cavitation noise within the chamber exhibited quite a regular character in terms of the phase difference between instruments for limited cavitation. Varying cavitation levels clearly illustrated the effect of bubble size on the attendant frequency range for which there was an extremely high coherence or nearly perfect causality.

Vertically downward slug flow of air-water mixtures was experimentally investigated in circular pipes of diameter D = 2.60, 10.16, and 14.0 cm. The terminal velocity of descending, stationary, and ascending bubbles in downward flows was measured and correlated with the air and water volumetric flux densities. Except for very small pipe diameters, bubbles in downward flow are unstable and eccentrically located off the pipe axis in regions of lower fluid velocities. Consequently, the value of the flow distribution parameter C0 is less than unity for downward flow, compared to C0 = 1 for rising bubbles in quiescent liquid, and C0 = 1.2 for ascending bubbles in upward flow. Above a certain pipe diameter stable Taylor bubbles are not possible for downward flows. The terminal velocity coefficient C1 is no longer 0.35 for downward flows in relatively large pipes because the unstable bubbles ride the pipe wall, resulting in a higher value of C1.

The simple model of pressure pulse propagation in slug flow proposed by Henry, Grolmes, and Fauske has been extended by considering wave reflection and wave transmission at gas-liquid interfaces. A frequency-response model applied to a series of idealized gas and liquid slugs yields a pulse propagation speed that approaches the homogeneous model value as the number of slugs is increased for a given void fraction. All characteristic roots from the solution to a three-equation drift-flux model are related to the velocity of the center of mass of the mixture. The pulse propagation speed relative to this velocity is exactly equal to the homogeneous model value, however. Measured pulse propagation speeds in vertically downward slug flow are, as anticipated, much less than those predicted by the simple model of Henry, Grolmes, and Fauske, but slightly greater than the homogeneous model value. Measured pressure surges produced by the rapid closure of a downstream valve in a pipeline are reasonably well predicted by the drift-flux model. For the range of void fractions, pressures, and velocities encountered in this study, it is concluded that pressure pulse speeds and the magnitude of pressure surges in slug flow can be adequately predicted by a homogeneous model.