Short history of energy dissipators in hydraulic engineering

Dissipation of energy in hydraulic engineering is one of the topics for which experimental hydraulics is still essential, given the complications with numerical methods for highly turbulent multiphase flow. The following would like to add to the historical development of hydraulic engineering in terms of energy dissipators and highlight European contributions in particular. After a general introduction to the significance of dissipator structures, methods are outlined that were used in the first decades of the 20 th century. At the end of this paper a number of distinguished engineers are presented in terms of short biographies that have considerably added to the present knowledge of energy dissipators.