J. Augustine DeSazilly

Last updated

J. Augustine DeSazilly ( fl. mid-19th century) was a French engineer.

In the early 1850s, DeSazilly published a paper postulating the "profile of equal resistance," a major theoretical advance in the technology of masonry gravity dams, based on the hydrostatic force exerted by a given height of water in relation to the weight of masonry used in the dam's construction (estimated at 150 pounds per cubic foot). DeSazilly considered two extreme conditions, a filled reservoir and an empty reservoir, and created a model for equalizing stresses on the masonry across every horizontal cross section. He developed a vertical cross section in which the stresses at the upstream face of a masonry gravity dam with the reservoir empty are equal to those at the downstream face with the reservoir filled. His hypothesis provided a means of calculating the minimum amount of material that could be used while assuring stability. Although he himself never carried out the construction of a dam on this "profile of equal resistance," it was used in 1858 to build the Furens Dam across the river Loire. [1]

DeSazilly also developed a process of surface drainage for building on a slope, [2] and contributed to the building of railways, [3] roads, and bridges. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dam</span> Barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface or underground streams

A dam is a barrier that stops or restricts the flow of surface water or underground streams. Reservoirs created by dams not only suppress floods but also provide water for activities such as irrigation, human consumption, industrial use, aquaculture, and navigability. Hydropower is often used in conjunction with dams to generate electricity. A dam can also be used to collect or store water which can be evenly distributed between locations. Dams generally serve the primary purpose of retaining water, while other structures such as floodgates or levees are used to manage or prevent water flow into specific land regions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre-Simon Girard</span> French mathematician and engineer (1765–1836)

Pierre-Simon Girard was a French mathematician and engineer, who worked on fluid mechanics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugène Freyssinet</span> French structural engineer (1879–1962)

Eugène Freyssinet was a French structural and civil engineer. He was the major pioneer of prestressed concrete.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claude-Louis Navier</span> French engineer and physicist (1785–1836)

Claude-Louis Navier was a French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics.

The Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Ouest, often referred to simply as L'Ouest or Ouest, was an early French railway company which operated from the years 1855 through 1909.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Joseph Minard</span> French civil engineer (1781–1870)

Charles Joseph Minard was a French civil engineer recognized for his significant contribution in the field of information graphics in civil engineering and statistics. Minard was, among other things, noted for his representation of numerical data on geographic maps, especially his flow maps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant</span> French mathematician (1797–1886)

Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant was a mechanician and mathematician who contributed to early stress analysis and also developed the unsteady open channel flow shallow water equations, also known as the Saint-Venant equations that are a fundamental set of equations used in modern hydraulic engineering. The one-dimensional Saint-Venant equation is a commonly used simplification of the shallow water equations. Although his full surname was Barré de Saint-Venant in mathematical literature other than French he is known as Saint-Venant. His name is also associated with Saint-Venant's principle of statically equivalent systems of load, Saint-Venant's theorem and for Saint-Venant's compatibility condition, the integrability conditions for a symmetric tensor field to be a strain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pont de Bir-Hakeim</span> Bridge in Paris, France

The Pont de Bir-Hakeim, formerly the Pont de Passy, is an arch bridge that crosses the Seine in Paris. It connects the 15th and 16th arrondissement, passing through the Île aux Cygnes. The bridge, made of steel, was constructed between 1903 and 1905, in replacement of a footbridge that had been erected in 1878. The bridge has two levels: one for motor vehicles and pedestrians, the other being a viaduct built above the first one, through which passes Line 6 of the Paris Métro. The bridge is 237 metres (777 ft) long and 24.7 metres (81 ft) wide. The part crossing the Grand Bras of the Seine is slightly longer than the one crossing the Petit Bras.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Rodolphe Perronet</span> French architect and structural engineer

Jean-Rodolphe Perronet was a French architect and structural engineer, known for his many stone arch bridges. His best known work is the Pont de la Concorde (1787).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Aubert (engineer)</span> French engineer

Jean Aubert was a French engineer. In 1961, he used the idea of the German engineer Julius Greve from the last century to describe a pente d'eau, which was a way of moving boats up the gradient of a canal without locks. The design consisted of a sloping channel, through which a wedge of water on which the boat was floating could be pushed up an incline. This concept was used in both the Montech water slope and the Fonserannes water slopes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis-Jean Résal</span> French civil engineer

Jean Résal was a French civil engineer. He was a professor of mechanical engineering at the École polytechnique, and designed several metal bridges in France, especially bridges above the Seine in Paris:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gileppe Dam</span> Dam in Wallonia, Belgium

The Gileppe Dam is an arch-gravity dam on the Gileppe river in Jalhay, Liège province, Wallonia, Belgium. It was built in the 1870s to supply water for the wool industry in nearby Verviers. The monumental structure with its unusually thick profile played an important role in establishing an international standard for masonry gravity dams as a technology for major water supply systems. It was considered one of the strongest dams in Europe at the time, and it was the first dam built in modern Belgium. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was noted as supplying most of the drinking water for Verviers, as well as industrial water, and as producing hydroelectricity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paris–Le Havre railway</span>

The Paris–Le Havre railway is an important 228-kilometre long railway line, that connects Paris to the northwestern port city Le Havre via Rouen. Among the first railway lines in France, the section from Paris to Rouen opened on 9 May 1843, followed by the section from Rouen to Le Havre that opened on 22 March 1847.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tours–Saint-Nazaire railway</span>

The railway from Tours to Saint-Nazaire is an important French 282-kilometre long railway line, following the lower course of the river Loire. It is used for passenger and freight traffic. The railway was opened in several stages between 1848 and 1857.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Boulanger (politician)</span> French economist and politician

Ernest Boulanger was a French politician and economist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Séjourné</span>

Paul Séjourné was a French engineer who specialized in the construction of large bridges from masonry, a domain in which he made some important innovations.

Émiland Marie Gauthey was a French mathematician, civil engineer and architect. As an engineer for the Estates of Burgundy, he was the creator of a great deal of the region's civil infrastructure, such as the Canal du Centre between Digoin and Chalon-sur-Saône (1784–1793), bridges including those at Navilly (1782–1790) and Gueugnon (1784–1787), and buildings such as the Eglise Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul at Givry and the theatre at Chalon-sur-Saône.

Jean Salençon is a French physicist born on November 13, 1940. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Technologies.

References

  1. Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), pp. 22–23 online.
  2. Charles Couche, Permanent Way Rolling Stock and Technical Working of Railways (London, 1877, translation of French edition) vol. 1, p. 471 online.
  3. Annales des ponts et chaussées (Paris, 1852), pp. 93–93 online; Annales des mines 5 (1854), pp. 411–412 online; Auguste Perdonnet, Traité élémentaire des chemins de fer (Paris, 1865), vol. 1, p. 458 online.
  4. French Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, Notices sur les modèles, cartes et dessins relatifs aux travaux publics (Paris, 1867), p. 27 online; Annales des ponts et chaussées 13 (1887), p. 675 online.