Sorry folks, but in between being useless and lazy over the Labor Day Holiday weekend and in addition to writing my blogs, I’ve also been busy the past few weeks working on some nerdy research for some consulting engineering work that I’m doing with my friend Wayne Kirsner, the “Water Hammer Guru.”
Wayne and I go back about 17 years or so, to a time when I worked with him as an “Energy Consultant” at a now defunct consulting engineering firm in Atlanta. Since then we’ve kept in touch socially, and occasionally he employs me in his forensic engineering investigations because of my practical experience building giant things out of steel pipes and beams.
Can you imagine going into a courtroom to testify as to why a man died being “cooked” by 500 degree F steam and condensate in a manhole after a giant valve failed during the startup of a boiler plant?
Gruesome stuff, but somebody’s got to know how to figure out what happened so another life won’t be lost, and Wayne’s recognized as one of the best expert witnesses out there in the world today.
Any way, we’re currently working on some stuff relating to what’s commonly called “water hammer” in piping systems. Almost everyone has heard the audible effects of water hammer at one time or the other in a house or apartment.
Water hammer is that “thunk” that you hear when the dishwasher, washing machine, or even a toilet stops filling with water. It doesn’t happen every time, in every residence, and there are ways to prevent it from happening or reduce it’s effects if you have a water hammer problem.
We’re not really worrying about making money fixing restrooms, we’re more interested in talking about what happens when you have a water hammer in a 24” diameter pipe full of water or steam. In those situations it’s not just a annoyance, but, as I said before, it can be DEADLY in an industrial setting.
The technical name which the pointy headed PHD types use for water hammer is a “transient in a hydronic system.” Not taking MYSELF too seriously, I love being irreverent and picking on anyone that has spent money paying to torture themselves with six or more years of college education, so I do things like this with Photoshop:
No it's not actually the same as Hobos in your bath tubs, but I find it funny. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I’ve got to go check out our “hydronic systems”…
we might have some problems I need to solve…
No comments:
Post a Comment