W glossary entries

A wake is the region of disturbed, slower, and often vortical flow downstream of a body immersed in or moving through a fluid.

Wastewater treatment is the engineered removal, transformation, or control of contaminants in wastewater before discharge, reuse, or further handling.

Water hammer is a transient pressure surge generated when fluid velocity in a pipe changes rapidly.

Water quality is the physical, chemical, biological, and operational condition of water relative to a defined use, discharge, or receiving environment.

A waveguide is a physical structure that confines and guides electromagnetic, optical, or acoustic waves along a desired path.

The Weibull distribution is a flexible probability distribution used to model time-to-failure, strength, fatigue life, and weakest-link behavior.

A weld bead is the deposited and solidified weld metal produced by one welding pass or by the visible surface of a weld.

A Wheatstone bridge is a four-resistor bridge circuit used to detect or measure small resistance changes by comparing two voltage divider legs.

A wind tunnel is a test facility that produces controlled airflow around models, vehicles, components, or specimens to measure aerodynamic behavior.

A work breakdown structure is a hierarchical decomposition of project scope into deliverables, work packages, and manageable units of work.

Work hardening is the increase in strength and hardness that occurs when a ductile material is plastically deformed.

The wye-delta transform converts a three-terminal star network into an equivalent delta network, or the reverse, while preserving terminal behavior.