Andrea Magali Fletes | November 9th, 2024

If you have ever dreamed of a day in Venice, you would know that the culinary richness of a cioccolato gelato or bigoli pasta is simply one of the city’s many extravagances. Picture this: you are standing on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, Italy. Less than 100 feet in front of you, there is nothing but rushing water, and to your sides, there is a 15th-century palazzo. You wonder, “With water all around, how do these 500-year-old architectural structures elegantly stand?” The city is analogous to a Venetian pastry, one that has been carefully engineered and enjoyed by all-fluid mechanics — or, as the Italians call it, meccanica dei fluidi. 

Meccanica dei fluidi

Before you enjoy a pastry, you must create, understand, and execute the baking process. Similarly, one must understand particular engineering fundamentals before understanding the beauty and complexity of the palazzo facades. Meccanica dei fluidi is a branch of classical physics that analyzes and quantifies the behavior of fluids in motion. Fluid mechanics can then be divided into fluid dynamics and fluid statics. Both use mathematical equations to describe fluids in motion and at rest, respectively. For the governing principles of Venetian infrastructure, the microscope will be set on fluid dynamics.

Fluid dynamics is an experimental and theoretical active research field that deals with the behavior of fluids in motion. Imagine yourself designing a car. What external factors should you optimize for product efficiency? Perhaps it is the aerodynamics and proper airflow of the car, the fuel consumption, or engine performance. Rather than incurring the cost of prototyping and testing cars to fine-tune these different parameters, engineers instead run theoretical simulations on computer programs. These computer software programs are integrated with numerical methods and algorithms that use fluid dynamic mathematical equations to model data — computational fluid dynamics (CFDs).

How fluid dynamics works

Fluid dynamics is not a cookie-cutter approach — it is so complex that one myth alleges Einstein found an equation modeling fluid dynamics so difficult he gave up and went to work on his theory of relativity. Fluid computational dynamics (CFD) uses software to model and predict behavior of fluid flows, such as gases or liquids. For this, a skilled programmer needs access to CFD and data analysis visualization softwares that have built-in tools to create 2D or 3D models of the simulation data and CFD visualization images.

The Venetian MOSE project

Surrounded entirely by water in a lagoon and built on a group of 126 islands, Venice gets flooded roughly 100 times per year from a natural phenomenon referred to as “acqua alta,” meaning high water. Rising sea levels and climate change have detrimentally been the cause of high tides coming into the lagoon from the Mediterranean Sea. To preserve the 500-year-old architectural structures, it was absolutely essential to implement the necessary infrastructure through what is today known as the MOSE project.

The $8 billion MOSE project is a tidal floodgate system that prevents flooding through the installation of 78 mobile water barriers. These water barriers rise during high tides and are submerged during low tides to allow for water circulation in the lagoon. For three years, engineers worked on utilizing computational fluid dynamics to simulate water flow at specific points in time at various sea levels. These fluid dynamic models were at the core of designing the mechanical systems for MOSE — it was the principle for understanding how the barriers would operate under changing parameters like sea levels or ship traffic.

A Venetian pastry for Vanderbilt students

More than 20 Vanderbilt engineering students traveled to Italy last spring to learn about these precise applications of engineering fundamentals, even visiting the MOSE project itself. As part of a class taught in the Department of Civil Engineering, it was an opportunity for them to channel their intellectual knowledge learned in academia into real-world applications. They traveled to Milan, Rome, and Venice to learn about various engineered phenomena. 

In Milan, they networked with architects who had worked with the notable Zaha Hadid and with students from the Polytechnic University of Milan. In Venice, they met with engineers who were working on the MOSE project. It comes to show how the interplay between mathematical applications and the real world — between fluid dynamics and architectural beauty — is central to the challenges that contemporary engineers face in an ever-changing world.

References

Fluid mechanics. Fluid Mechanics – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/fluid-mechanics 

Project. MOSE Venezia.  https://www.mosevenezia.eu/project/?lang=en