VITI

ITALY (see also List of Individuals)

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11.4.1908 Roma/I - 9.2.2005 Roma/I

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Mario Viti graduated as a civil engineer from Rome University. He was from the 1950s a Lecturer there in hydraulics and appointed professor of hydraulics in 1965. Viti retired from his position in 1983 and passed away at the age of 97 years.

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Viti was a distinguished hydraulics professor in Italy who had contributed to various problems in hydraulic engineering. An early paper deals with velocity measurements in side weirs to determine all members of the governing equation of spatially varied flow. The 1964 paper involves an early computational approach to determine water hammer waves in a hydropower project. Italy at this time was one of the most active countries in designing dams for multipurpose use, and it still is one of the few European countries where nuclear power production was forbidden by the public. The 1967 paper involves the prediction of wave arrival for unsteady supercritical flow, thereby using the De Saint-Venant equations. A companion paper published in 1969 aimed at determining the wave celerity for supercritical flows. Still another paper published in 1971 presented experimental methods for observing rapidly varied free surface fluctuations due to wave passage. As most of his colleagues, Viti also published a book with a collection of his lectures for educational purposes. In 1976 he published in collaboration with two collaborators a paper on the resistance law as applied to composite channels, in which the base channel normally has a roughness different from the flood plains. Viti was a chairman during the 1980 Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, a bi-annual Italian tradition during which recent findings are exchanged among the participants and which serves as a national meeting for defining future research projects.

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_{Anonymous (1980). Mario Viti e Enrico Marchi. 17 Convegno di Idraulica Palermo 2: 296. P}

_{Massaro, E. (2006). Mario Viti. Personal communication. P}

_{Mele, P., Morganti, M., Viti, M. (1976). Legge di resistenza e scala dei deflussi nei canali a sezione composta. L'Energia Elettrica 52(11): 601-611.}

_{Testa, P., Viti, M. (1971). Metodo ottico per il rilievo delle altezze liquide rapidamente variabili. L'Energia Elettrica 47(5): 285-296.}

_{Viti, M. (1959). Misure di velocità negli stramazzi laterali. L'Energia Elettrica 36(7): 589-594.}

_{Viti, M. (1964). Annuncio delle oscillazioni nei pozzi piezometrici durante il funzionamento a potenza costante. L'Acqua 42(5): 1-10.}

_{Viti, M. (1967). Moto vario in corrente veloce. L'Acqua 45(6): 1-10.}

_{Viti, M. (1975). Lezioni di idraulica - meccanica dei fluidi. Veschi: Roma.}