Resistance to flow is an important engineering subject. It is applicable to every branch of engineering where flows of liquids and gases take place. The importance of exact and true values of flow resistance is, primarily, a question of determining the pumping or power requirements for any apparatus or, eventually, for the entire plant involved in the motion of fluid. Needless to say, energy requirements are equivalent to the size of the funding capital, or operational, costs and are therefore of prime importance to the practice of engineering.

In this fourth edition all the errors and misprints that were found in the Russian and English versions of the previous editions have been corrected, and new sections have been written for almost all the chapters of the handbook. The use of this handbook can easily be likened to the use of an illustrated catalogue. Various pieces of equipment and flow components, including fittings and entire systems have been assembled in separate chapters and catalogued using illustrations, graphs, and tabular data.

Translated by: G. Malyavskaya, N. Shveyeva