Talk:Piping (engineering)

Wikipedia has an article of the same name

I was a contributor to the WP article. It has been completely re-written for porting it here as a CZ article. Milton Beychok 23:16, 26 August 2008 (CDT)

Bagpiping?

I have never heard of piping in this sense. As a fan of Irish and Scottish music, I think "piping" means playing the pipes, not laying the pipes. No? Well, is a disambiguation page in order? --Larry Sanger 05:42, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it is in order. Will do sometimes in the next 5-6 days. Thanks, Milton Beychok 06:20, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

For that matter, "laying pipe" has an idiomatic meaning excluded by the Family Friendliness policy. While I fully understand Milt's usage, piping also is a term in commercial and residential plumbing. "Pipe" is also a term of art in computer science; the version we see in templates and links is a subset of the idea of connecting information flows, but it is sometimes (probably not quite accurately) called "piping" as well.

I cannot resist, however, citing Robert Heinlein's description of a novice (bag)piper, as a man who looks and sounds as if he has a cat, upside down, under his arm, and is chewing the tail. Howard C. Berkowitz 06:48, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Larry, done as promised. Just as a piece of trivia, there are probably more people worldwide who know what industrial piping means than there are people in all of Scotland. Howard, at my age, "laying pipe" is but a very faint memory. Milton Beychok 03:28, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Best sort of synergy and collaboration

First, I'm delighted to find that someone is reading nuclear MASINT. I'm even happier that these articles now are very sensibly linked. Actually, some of the weather and CBR sensing systems in geophysical MASINT might link to air pollution. Of course, now that we have a meteorologist on board... Howard C. Berkowitz 07:51, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind words. I almost always use Google to search CZ (here) when I start adding links to an article ... that's how I happened upon Nuclear MASINT. I can't honestly say that I read the article ... just scanned to find the word "piping" so that I could make it into a link to Piping (engineering). Will you forgive me? Milton Beychok 08:20, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm laughing sadly. What a bizarre concept...checking the literature? I can't think of how many times I've seen new authors merrily start articles without bothering to check that a closely existing one already exists here. When they never link to any prior CZ work, it tends to be a very bad sign, although I've sometimes gently pointed that out.

Should I say "put that in your piping and smoke it"?

The more that I think about it, there are other military issues concerned with piping. In the specific example, it's less military than nuclear engineering, just as much for civilian nuclear power plant. Steel gets brittle under long-term neutron flux.

When the submarine USS Thresher was lost with all hands, while she was a nuclear boat, the causes of the disaster, as best as can be reconstructed, were related to non-radioactive piping. Afterwards, a major change in building practices, called SUBSAFE, went into effect, and was greatly concerned with piping.

From memory, the sequence of events appears to be that a welded or brazed joint failed in a high-pressure water line. When they released high-pressure air to stop the flooding, it seemed that the rapid expansion and cooling of the air caused ice to form in pipes, valves, or both, to the extent that they could not blow ballast for emergency surfacing. Unable to rise, the boat eventually passed crush depth. The only consolation is that experiments have shown that crushing failures in modern submarines are extremely catastrophic and rapid; the air superheats as the hull contracts, and death probably happens in milliseconds.

In the SUBSAFE program, they went to 100% radiation or ultrasound imaging of every pipe joint. Inspection of subs in the same construction line, even though the welds were carefully done, revealed a frightening number of defects in absolutely critical joints. Valves were redesigned to be protected against ice formation, but a completely separate "emergency blow" system was implemented for the critical surfacing tanks. As I understand, it essentially is a short mechanical coupling that opens compressed air bottles connected to these tanks through large-diameter piping that they believe cannot be blocked by ice under the worst-case conditions.

Are there similar zero-defect programs for critical chemical industry piping? Howard C. Berkowitz 08:43, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, welding is taken very seriously in industrial piping. All welders are highly trained and must pass certain certifcation tests. In many cases, depending upon what substances will be handled in operation (acids, caustics, hydrogen, etc.), piping and vessels will be imaged by x-raying and other methods. Stress relieving is sometimes required. During operation, corrosion is continually being monitored. When you have piping and vessels operating at about 3,000 psig and 900 °F handling highly combustible hydrogen and hydrocarbons (as in a hydrocracking unit in a petroleum refinery), there is no such thing as too much inspection or too much monitoring. There are also various strict codes that all piping and vessels must comply with (such as the codes published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and by the American Petroleum Institute, both of which are used worldwide). Milton Beychok 16:47, 24 January 2009 (UTC)