About Journal of Hydrodynamics

Journal of Hydrodynamics

The Journal of Hydrodynamics is an English-language, peer-reviewed journal devoted to original theoretical, computational and experimental research in hydrodynamics — the science of how liquids move and how they interact with solid boundaries, structures and other phases of matter. It was initiated in 1989 as an independent English periodical by the editorial committee behind China's Chinese-language hydrodynamics journal, and it is published bimonthly. Its ISSN is 1001-6058. The journal covers advances in naval architecture and ocean engineering, marine and ocean engineering, environmental engineering, water conservancy and hydropower engineering, energy exploration, chemical engineering, and biological and biomedical engineering, among other fields. Long published in association with Elsevier as the Journal of Hydrodynamics, Ser. B, it transferred to Springer on 1 January 2018 and is now carried as a Springer journal, number 42241. Rooted in Shanghai's ship-science and fluid-mechanics community, it has been for more than three decades a principal channel through which Chinese hydrodynamics research reaches international readers.

Hydrodynamics is one of the foundational sciences of a maritime and riverine country. It determines how ships move through water, how waves load offshore structures, how turbines and pumps perform, how rivers carry sediment and how pollutants disperse. A specialised English journal in Shanghai — China's greatest port and shipbuilding centre — gave the country's large community of naval architects, hydraulic engineers and fluid mechanicians a dedicated international outlet of their own, distinct from general mechanics and general fluid-mechanics journals published elsewhere.

Origins: the Chinese journal of 1986 and the English journal of 1989

The history of the Journal of Hydrodynamics begins with its Chinese counterpart. According to the journal's own conference history, the Chinese Journal of Hydrodynamics, formerly Journal of Hydrodynamics, Ser. A, in Chinese, started publication in 1986. Three years later, in 1989, an independent English periodical, the Journal of Hydrodynamics, was initiated by the same editorial committee, and it has since been published bimonthly. That two-series structure — a Chinese series and an English series under a shared editorial tradition — was a common pattern for major Chinese specialist journals of the period, allowing domestic research to be reported in Chinese for home readers while a parallel English title carried selected and original work to the international community.

The English journal was therefore not a translation bulletin but, in its founders' description, an independent periodical. Over the following decades it developed its own author and reader base, publishing original theoretical, computational and experimental contributions across the whole field, and becoming the version of the journal that international indexing, libraries and readers outside China know. The founding date of 1989 places it in the first wave of English-language specialist journals created in China during the reform era, alongside titles such as the English Acta Mechanica Sinica of 1985, with which it shares a sponsoring society.

Shanghai, ships and the journal's home community

The clean record for this journal places it in Shanghai, and the city is integral to its subject. Shanghai is home to major ship-science research, to Shanghai Jiao Tong University's naval architecture tradition, and to the Shanghai Institute of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Shanghai University — institutions that appear repeatedly in the journal's community life. When the community marked twenty years of the Chinese journal in 2006, it held the first Conference of Global Chinese Scholars on Hydrodynamics in Shanghai; the second conference, in 2016, was held in Wuxi. Those conferences were jointly sponsored by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Hydrodynamics together with the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, the Chinese Society of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society and the Chinese Society of Oceanography, with support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and a roll of universities and state key laboratories in the field.

That sponsor list is a map of the journal's constituency. Hydrodynamics in China is not housed in a single discipline: it is shared among mechanics societies, naval architects, hydraulic engineers concerned with dams and rivers, and oceanographers. The Journal of Hydrodynamics sits at the intersection of those communities, and its editorial board has drawn on all of them. Selected papers from the 2016 conference, for example, were published in the sixth issue of the journal's twenty-eighth volume, in the same year, continuing a practice of binding the journal closely to the field's conference life.

Scope: the full range of hydrodynamics

Springer, the journal's present publisher, describes the Journal of Hydrodynamics as devoted to publishing original content encompassing all aspects of hydrodynamics. It provides a platform for theoretical, computational and experimental contributions, covers areas including naval architecture, ocean engineering, environmental engineering, water conservancy and hydropower engineering, energy exploration, chemical engineering, and biological and biomedical engineering, and aims to promote the development of hydrodynamic research and its applications. The journal's earlier Elsevier description added that it presents the latest achievements in developing physical models and computational methods, theoretical and experimental studies, software development and test technologies, and offers a platform for exchanging experiences and information and promoting the further development of hydrodynamic research and its applications in China and elsewhere.

Few engineering journals cover territory this wide, and the breadth is deliberate. The same governing equations describe water flowing past a ship's hull, through a turbine, down a river channel and around a marine structure, so a hydrodynamics journal can — and this one does — treat naval, hydraulic, environmental and industrial flows as branches of one science, united by method even where their applications differ. For authors, that means work on a pump, a propeller or a pollutant plume can appear side by side; for readers, it means a single bimonthly title surveys the state of the whole field in China and beyond.

Topics: from ship hydrodynamics to cavitation and multiphase flow

The detailed subject list published for the journal gives a precise picture of its contents. It covers ship hydrodynamics; wave loads and fluid–solid interactions; turbulence and boundary layers; cavitating flow and cavitation mechanics; multiphase flow; pipe flow and open-channel flow; convection and diffusion; heat and mass transfer; bio-fluid mechanics; and permeation fluid mechanics, together with other frontier disciplines. Those topics are pursued in relation to ocean and ship engineering, environmental engineering, water conservancy and hydropower engineering, energy exploration and chemical engineering.

Several of those subjects explain the journal's importance to industry as well as to science. Cavitation — the formation and collapse of vapour bubbles in fast-moving liquid — damages propellers, rudders, pumps and turbines and generates noise, and research on it, including work on cavitation in hydraulic machinery, is among the journal's most cited material. Turbulence and boundary-layer research underlies predictions of ship resistance and therefore of fuel consumption. Fluid–solid interaction governs how waves and currents load ships and offshore structures. Multiphase flow — mixtures of liquid with gas bubbles, droplets or solid particles — runs from marine propulsion to chemical plants and sediment-laden rivers. A journal holding all of these within one scope serves the engineers who design China's ships, dams, ports and water systems as directly as it serves academic fluid mechanicians.

Methods: theory, computation and experiment

The journal's identity rests on a threefold method, stated in its own descriptions: theoretical, computational and experimental hydrodynamics. Theoretical work develops the mathematics of flow; computational work — computational fluid dynamics and related numerical methods — simulates flows too complex for closed-form solution; experimental work, in towing tanks, wave basins, cavitation tunnels and laboratories, measures real flows and validates the other two approaches. The journal's stated interest in physical models, computational methods, software development and test technologies reflects all three legs of that structure.

The balance among the three has shifted over the journal's life, as it has across fluid mechanics worldwide. Computation has grown from a supporting tool into a primary method, and the journal's pages record that transition in Chinese hydrodynamics: studies using particle methods such as smoothed particle hydrodynamics for fluid–structure interaction, and work on vortex identification methods, are among the research themes associated with the journal in bibliometric surveys of its contents. What has not changed is the requirement, embedded in the journal's scope, that new methods answer to physical reality — through comparison with experiment or with the observed behaviour of ships, structures and rivers.

Publishing history: from Elsevier's Ser. B to Springer

For many years international readers knew the journal through Elsevier, under the designation Journal of Hydrodynamics, Ser. B — the counterpart of the Chinese-language Ser. A. Elsevier's own journal shop records the change that followed: as of 1 January 2018, the journal transferred to a new publisher, Springer, where it appears as journal number 42241. Under Springer, Liandi Zhou is named as the journal's editor-in-chief in the publisher's guidance for special-issue proposals — one of the mechanisms, the publisher notes, by which the journal periodically runs special issues on topics relevant to hydrodynamic research and its applications, including special issues originating from conferences and workshops organised around specific themes.

Directory and bibliometric records list the journal's publisher also in connection with China Ocean Press, the Chinese publishing house associated with the journal's Chinese home — a familiar dual structure for transferred Chinese journals, in which a domestic publisher of record sits behind an international publishing partner that operates the global platform. The practical effect of the 2018 transfer for readers was continuity of the title, its ISSN and its bimonthly rhythm, with submission, production and access moving to Springer's systems. The journal is not an open-access title; it reaches its international readership chiefly through institutional subscriptions to the Springer platform, as it previously did through Elsevier's ScienceDirect.

Community, conferences and special issues

The Journal of Hydrodynamics has never been only a bimonthly bundle of papers. Its editorial board is one of the joint sponsors of the Conference of Global Chinese Scholars on Hydrodynamics, the field's gathering for researchers of Chinese origin worldwide: first held in Shanghai in 2006 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Chinese Journal of Hydrodynamics, and held for a second time in Wuxi in November 2016. The printed proceedings of the 2016 conference, published by China Ocean Press, collected more than 150 technical papers across theoretical hydrodynamics, experiments and measurement, computational fluid dynamics, industrial fluid dynamics, naval hydrodynamics and ocean engineering, and hydraulic, water-conservancy and environmental hydrodynamics — a table of contents that doubles as a survey of the journal's own scope.

Special issues form the other bridge between the journal and its community. Springer's guidance explains that the journal periodically runs special issues on topics relevant to hydrodynamic research and its applications, including issues arising from conferences and workshops, with proposals assessed for their justification and their fit with the journal's overall theme. Selected conference papers appearing in regular issues, as in 2016, perform the same function: they pull the results presented at the field's meetings into the refereed journal record, where they can be cited and built upon.

Distinctions from other titles

The journal's name invites a few clarifications that matter for anyone cataloguing Chinese periodicals. The Journal of Hydrodynamics is the English title; the Chinese Journal of Hydrodynamics is its older Chinese-language sibling, not the same publication, and the two were historically distinguished as Ser. B and Ser. A respectively. It is also distinct from the general mechanics journals of the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics — the society whose conference sponsorship connects it to this journal — because its remit is specifically the mechanics of fluids in motion and at rest against boundaries, not the whole of mechanics; and it is distinct from the many international journals with hydrodynamics in their titles published in other countries, being specifically the Shanghai-rooted record of the Chinese research community in the field.

Its indexing history reflects that standing. Bibliometric services record the journal in Scopus with coverage from around 1990, the start of the English journal's life, and the founding description in the source record for this profile notes its inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded — placing it among the Chinese specialist journals that entered the main international citation systems and stayed there, rather than circulating only domestically.

Position and significance

Measured against its founding purpose, the Journal of Hydrodynamics has done the job its editorial committee set in 1989: it has given Chinese hydrodynamics — a field of direct consequence for a country that builds ships, dams, ports and offshore structures at world-leading scale — an English-language journal of its own, published bimonthly for more than thirty-five years, through two international publishers, without losing its identity or its home community in Shanghai's ship-science world.

For international readers, it remains a refereed window on work they would otherwise miss: much Chinese hydrodynamics research originates in ship-science institutes, hydraulic laboratories and state key laboratories whose first audience is domestic, and the journal is the channel that presents that work, in English, with theoretical, computational and experimental results together. For historians of Chinese science publishing, its trajectory — Chinese series in 1986, independent English journal in 1989, Elsevier's Ser. B, then Springer's journal 42241 from 2018 — is a concise example of how China's specialist journals internationalised in stages while keeping their editorial roots at home.