J. Augustine DeSazilly

J. Augustine DeSazilly (fl. mid-19th century) was a French engineer.

In the early 1850s, DeSazilly published a paper postulating the "profile of equal resistance," a major theoretical advance in the technology of masonry gravity dams, based on the hydrostatic force exerted by a given height of water in relation to the weight of masonry used in the dam's construction (estimated at 150 pounds per cubic foot). DeSazilly considered two extreme conditions, a filled reservoir and an empty reservoir, and created a model for equalizing stresses on the masonry across every horizontal cross section. He developed a vertical cross section in which the stresses at the upstream face of a masonry gravity dam with the reservoir empty are equal to those at the downstream face with the reservoir filled. His hypothesis provided a means of calculating the minimum amount of material that could be used while assuring stability. Although he himself never carried out the construction of a dam on this "profile of equal resistance," it was used in 1858 to build the Furens Dam across the Loire River.[1]

DeSazilly also developed a process of surface drainage for building on a slope,[2] and contributed to the building of railways,[3] roads, and bridges.[4]

References
  1. Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), pp. 22–23 online.
  2. Charles Couche, Permanent Way Rolling Stock and Technical Working of Railways (London, 1877, translation of French edition) vol. 1, p. 471 online.
  3. Annales des ponts et chaussées (Paris, 1852), pp. 93–93 online; Annales des mines 5 (1854), pp. 411–412 online; Auguste Perdonnet, Traité élémentaire des chemins de fer (Paris, 1865),vol. 1, p. 458 online.
  4. French Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, Notices sur les modèles, cartes et dessins relatifs aux travaux publics (Paris, 1867), p. 27 online; Annales des ponts et chaussées 13 (1887), p. 675 online.
  • A diagram of DeSazilly's "profile of equal resistance" may be viewed in The History of Large Federal Dams: Planning, Design, and Construction (Government Printing Office, 2005), p. 52 online.
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