Water Hammer in Pipes, Including Those Supplied by Centrifugal Pumps: Graphical Treatment

The damage done to pipes as a result of water hammer is so serious that no engineer can afford to neglect it in the design of long pipes, particularly those under low heads. Unfortunately the problem has appeared to many to be very intricate, and indeed the mathematical treatment is so involved and so lengthy that few practising engineers would attempt to solve water-hammer problems mathematically. In many cases a purely arbitrary rule has been employed in finding the pressure rise, with little knowledge on the part of the engineer as to whether the formula fits his case or not, and thus much money may be wasted on too heavy a line, or, on the other hand, it may be so light as to be dangerous.In the following treatment of the subject, the rigid theory has first been explained and some problems have been solved, but most of the paper deals with the elastic (and correct) theory. A problem is first worked out by the arithmetical integration method in order to establish ideas and to make the subsequent argume...