Flow nets and textbooks Available to Purchase

Textbooks in soil mechanics for undergraduate, postgraduate and professional use have been published since 1941. Most of them cover the use of flow nets to illustrate or solve problems in seepage. A review of a number of such textbooks reveals that the examples of flow nets provided are often few in number, and greatly simplified. Many of the example illustrations contain errors that are of the ‘schoolboy howler’ kind and which have not been corrected from edition to edition of a particular textbook. Perhaps more controversially, there are cases where illustrations from one source appear to have been reproduced in different books by different authors, complete with the errors. The flow net technique predates the first comprehensive textbook on soil mechanics and so has been fully understood throughout the period covered by the review; these inconsistencies are therefore difficult to explain away as the graphical equivalent of the typographical error or as something that was not understood fully at the time of publication.