Da Vinci's observation of turbulence: A French-Italian study aiming at numerically reproducing the physics behind one of his drawings, 500 years later

Abstract

This research was started in 2019 for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death. Our Italian-French research group focused its attention on a famous drawing by da Vinci in which a water jet impacts on a pool (RCIN 912660 The Windsor Collection). This particular drawing has often been used by many fluid dynamicists as the first important document concerning turbulent flows. It is worth noting that the word "turbulence,"one of the most important phenomena in fluid dynamics, was used for the first time by da Vinci in the "Atlantic codex."After a detailed study of different historical documents, we sought to reproduce the flow drawn in the sheet RCIN 912660 using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics model in order to better analyze the different descriptions that Leonardo reported beside his drawing.