Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Hydronics

Well I stopped by my old friend Ed's today and learned a new word. Ed has been working with hydronics for the last 30 years. He says hydro is latin for water, and ics is latin for sh!t. Did I say he's my friend? :) He's going to show me all the things I did wrong when I built my flash heater so that I don't end up getting hurt from something bursting. Hopefully he's got some appropriate components at his shop that I can have.
Some of the things I neglected:
- a way of throttling the heat, i.e. fire to prevent steam flash
- a strainer
- the fact that pressure increases when pipe volume decreases
- known flow rate
- establishing min and max parameters and operating in the middle.

Sometimes optimism is good, sometimes it can get you hurt. Building a boiler falls in the later category; nevertheless it seems that I have to familiarize myself with this to kick start some useful residential scale heliostat target prototypes.

No comments:

Post a Comment