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

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

whoa... dumping that much mass into a truck that quickly isn't going to do the shock absorbers much good... even if it is a mine truck.

hey, wait a second... these are open top trucks with a sprinkler system, basically modified dump trucks?

Why not just have an overhead tank that fills inbetween uses, and dumps the water into the truck in one large-ish chunk using a 'trap door' and chute arrangement? Kinda like they use at water parks for creating waves.

Of course, I know nothing much about hydraulic engineering... so I could just be talking nonsense.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

They're modified dump trucks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Eh5000.JPG) with a tank on the back instead of a tipper, with a hole in the top 2m^2.

We've built similar systems, but smaller in scale: only 80 tonnes in 5 minutes.

(That tower is 7m hight, and the pipe is 300mm welded steel.)