A few things that can go very wrong when you put steam in a pipe. We talked about the damaging effects of water hammer, but there’s another state of H2O equally if not more dangerous when put in pipes. In this episode, we’re talking about steam hammer and differential shock.
This video shows a demonstration and brief explanation of air lock in fluid pipelines. If you assume that gasses don’t get into pipes or that they can’t constrict the flow, you might design a pipeline that doesn’t work. Luckily for engineers, this is a well-known phenomenon in pipe systems. It’s just one of the complexities that come with the job and we’ve come up a with a lot of creative ways to overcome it.
