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

[the-starshadow.livejournal.com]

The primary problem that I see is that with that much water travelling that quickly, you may run into some interestingly esoteric fluid dynamics issues, like heavily choked flow and the like. *ponders*

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

if we don't get the valve right, the water hammer will register 4.5 on the Richter scale.

[the-starshadow.livejournal.com]

... yeah, that's a good way of putting it. *shudder*