This course of lectures is an introduction to hydraulics, the traditional name for fluid mechanics in civil and environmental engineering where sensible and convenient approximations to apparentlycomplex situations are made. An attempt is made to obtain physical understanding and insight into the subject by emphasising that we are following a modelling process, where simplicity, insight, and ad...

The science of plant water transport is equal parts of physics and biology. Plants have evolved a complex wick system that harnesses the cohesive hydrogen bond energy of liquid water and suppresses the heterogeneous nucleation of caVitation. Trade-offs between making the wick safe against cavitation and implosion, yet efficient in moving water, result in the process being limiting to plant perf...

Spiders rely on a hydraulic system to stretch their legs but use muscles make flex. The compound drive of hydraulics and muscle makes an integrate dexterous structure with powerful locomotion abilities, which perfectly meets the primary requirements advanced robots. Inspired by this hydraulics-muscle co-drive joint, novel flexible joint actuator was proposed its driving characteristics were pre...

Subchannel codes have been widely used for thermal-hydraulics analyses in nuclear reactors. This paper details the development of a novel subchannel code within Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) Multi-physics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE). MOOSE is parallel computational framework targeted at solution systems coupled, nonlinear partial differential equations, that often arise s...

The xylem hydraulic efficiency and safety is usually measured on mechanically unstressed samples, although trees may be exposed to combined hydraulic and mechanical stress in the field. We analysed changes in hydraulic conductivity and vulnerability to drought-induced embolism during static bending of Picea abies and Pinus sylvestris branches as well as the effect of dynamic bending on the vuln...