Fluid mechanics is a branch of physics related to the mechanics of fluids (liquids, gases and plasmas) and the forces they exert on them. Fluid mechanics has a wide range of applications, including mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, geophysics, astrophysics and biology. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid static, the study of fluid at rest; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid movement. It is a branch of continuous mechanics, a subject that models matter without using the information that it is made up of atoms; that is, it models matter from a macroscopic rather than a microscopic point of view. Fluid mechanics, especially fluid dynamics, is an active field of research with many problems that are partially or totally unresolved. Fluid mechanics can be mathematically complex, and can best be solved by numerical methods, usually using computers. A modern discipline, called computational fluid dynamics (CFD), is dedicated to this approach to solving fluid mechanics problems. The particle image velocimetry, an experimental method to visualize and analyze the flow of fluids, also takes advantage of the highly visual nature of fluid flow.
The study of fluid mechanics goes back at least to the times of ancient Greece, when Archimedes investigated static fluidity and buoyancy and formulated his famous law now known as the principle of Archimedes, which was published in his work On floating bodies , generally considered the first great work in fluid mechanics. The rapid advance in fluid mechanics began with Leonardo da Vinci (observations and experiments), Evangelista Torricelli (he invented the barometer), Isaac Newton (he investigated viscosity) and Blaise Pascal (he researched hydrostatics, he formulated Pascal's law), and continued by Daniel Bernoulli with the introduction of the mathematical dynamics of fluids in Hydrodynamics (1739).
The flow of Inviscid was analyzed by several mathematicians (Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Siméon Denis Poisson) and the viscous flow was explored by a multitude of engineers such as Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille and Gotthilf Hagen. More mathematical justification was provided by Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes in the Navier-Stokes equations, and boundary layers were investigated (Ludwig Prandtl, Theodore von Kármán), while several scientists such as Osborne Reynolds, Andrey Kolmogorov and Geoffrey Ingram Taylor Advanced in the understanding of fluid viscosity and turbulence.