Customer Query

[den]

Customer: You build automated water tanker fill stations, right?
Me: Yep! We've built them for mines.
C: Good. We have Euclids with 200 tonne* tanks we use to spray the roads.
Me: That won't be a problem, we can build to suit.
C: But there's a power problem. The fill stations will have to use gravity to move the water.
Me: That's still not a problem. We've built gravity-fed systems before.
C: And the tankers have to fill in less than 5 minutes.
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: (grabs calculator. 200,000/300=667 litres/second)
Me: Riiiight.


Over half a tonne of water per second. Fed by gravity. Time to talk to a hydraulic engineer.







*200,000 litres

Comments

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm thinking a double pipe, one tube to feed water into the truck, the other to draw air out, leading to the air pocket at the top of the reservoir, which will generate a partial vacuum and assist the water flow.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

There can't be any connections. The water has to drop out the end of the pipe and into a chute on top of the tank.

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Oh. Duh. Replace the tank, instead of filling it.

Sorry, lost my mad-science groove there for a second.

(Seriously, though, tell these guys that they'd spend less money buying extra trucks than trying to fill them that fast. :) )

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

Oh come ON! Why would you want to drive a normal truck when you can drive one of these? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Eh5000.JPG)

Plus, they want 9 fill stations. And they will pay us to build them. I don't want to tell them to spend less. 8)