Nikolai Pavlovskii

Born Dec. 6 (18), 1884, in Orel; died May 12, 1937, in Leningrad. Soviet specialist in hydraulics and hydrotechnics. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1932).

Pavlovskii graduated in 1912 from the St. Petersburg Institute of Railroad Engineers. He became a professor there and at the Forestry Institute in 1919. From 1921 he was a professor at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. Simultaneously, beginning in 1918, he carried out and directed research in hydraulics and hydrotechnics in a number of research institutions.

Pavlovskii’s most important work is The Theory of Groundwater Movement Under Hydraulic Engineering Structures and Principal Applications of the Theory (1922), in which he set forth new principles for the design of hydraulic engineering structures and developed the theory of the free movement and the movement under pressure of ground water. He worked out a method for calculating the flow of water in open streams, a method using electrohydrodynamic analogies for filtration calculations, and a method for the plotting of curves of the free surfaces of streams. He also proposed a formula for the determination of the coefficients in the equation for the speed of the uniform motion of fluid in pipes and in open channels. Pavlovskii took part in the creation of the Volkhov, Dnieper, and Svir’ hydroelectric power plants; in the construction of the Moscow subway; and in the solution of the Greater Volga problem. (The last involved the construction of a network of hydraulic structures on the Volga River and its tributaries.)