Monday, January 10, 2011

Holey Copper Pipes!

There has been chatter on my neighborhood-association listserv over the past eight years about pinhole leaks in copper household-water pipes. Several families have experienced them; others recounted horror stories about costly leaks that had suddenly plagued coworkers. What everyone has been asking is who’s at risk — and why?
As someone who’s been replacing old and rust-clogged galvanized basement pipes with copper over the past decade, these posts have riveted my attention. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech now offers some insights into the problem. And they aren’t reassuring.
His research finds that the problem can sometimes trace to good intentions on the part of water companies. Others to infected pipes. Yes, we’re talking germs here.
As for who’s at risk, it’s anyone with copper piping. And the dismal news: Alleviating vulnerability is not something homeowners can likely undertake. Moreover, once a few leaks develop in some section of pipe, it becomes reasonable to expect they’re in the process of developing elsewhere. If they riddle pipes buried in a wall, replacing them might require tearing out scads of sheetrock. And if prophylactic repairs aren’t undertaken promptly, global leaks might emerge, damaging walls all over and spurring the growth of disease-fostering mold.
A study published earlier this year by a Virginia Tech team led by Ewa Kleczyk found that in Maryland household experiencing these leaks, costs to fix the problem ranged from roughly $1,300 to more than $18,000. Another Virginia Tech analysis headed by Eric Sarver, which was published at the same time, estimates that nationally the costs of preventing and coping with pinhole leaks conservatively runs some $928 million a year. Owners of single-family homes bear the brunt of the costs. Approximately half of their costs go for plumbing repairs, another third for labor charges, and the rest to cover property damaged by leaks.
In some instances, Edwards points out, “People have lost their homes” from pipe failures as insurers dropped families after the first sign of leaks — and later damage eclipsed the ability of homeowners to finance repairs.
When Edwards first contemplated the pinhole-leaks mystery, which was showing up in new and old pipes, he reasoned that it wasn’t the copper that had changed but instead the water that had become more corrosive. So his team spent a decade cooking up some 500 different water recipes. The chemists altered mineral constituents, pollutants, and of course pH.
Obviously, decreasing water’s pH — which means increasing its acidity — should threaten pipes. But the Virginia Tech engineers showed that raising the pH to between 8.5 and 9 (7 is neutral) and increasing chlorine concentrations in water proved a particularly devastating, if counterintuitive, combo. “With that recipe,” Edwards told me and a handful of other reporters touring his lab on Oct. 18 (as part of a Society of Environmental Journalists’ tour), “we were able to eat holes in a copper pipe in the lab. In just 11 months we got like six holes in a one-foot section of pipe.”
With these data, Edwards said, for the first time “we had definitive proof” that water utilities could be fostering the degradation of some home-plumbing systems. “This was the first time that anyone had ever reproduced [pinhole-leak formation] in the lab.”
He says that other contributing factors to a water-system’s leak-fostering potential can include:
 — removal of organic matter from municipally treated water, as now required by the Environmental Protection Agency. In the past, organic residues often collected on pipes’ interior surfaces, creating what turned out to be a somewhat protective coating
— and a lining of water mains with cement to limit the likelihood that these community water-distribution conduits will corrode through, springing massive, gusher leaks. Because “the cement leaches a lot of lime into the water,” Edwards notes, “this treatment can raise water’s pH into the danger zone for pitting.”
Where might such conditions occur? Well, chlorine concentrations tend to be highest in water leaving a treatment plant. If the water travels far enough, it will lose that chlorine before entering a home. So communities nearest municipal treatment plants are especially vulnerable, Edwards says.
And the alkaline pH: Besides resulting from cement-lined mains, it can show up where utilities disinfect water by chloramination (a modern variation on the old theme of chlorination). The new treatment’s advantage is that it generates fewer potentially cancer-causing disinfection byproducts. And though chloramination doesn’t by itself raise a water’s pH, Edwards notes that many utilities deliberately raise pH to improve the quality of water that’s undergone this type of disinfection process.
The irony, of course, is that pipe pitting in these circumstances traces to good-faith efforts by the local utility to improve the healthiness of treated water. Edwards published some of these findings a few years ago based on studies funded by my local water utility (the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission).
But the Virginia Tech team discovered that copper leaks can stem from other problems as well. For instance, pinhole-leak epidemics can emerge in some communities where the water’s chlorine concentrations are low.
Preliminary (and yet unpublished) findings by his team are now pointing in some of these instances to plumbing infections. They’ve extracted colonies of sulfate-reducing bacteria, also known as SRBs, from pits in the interior of copper pipes. These bugs emit hydrogen sulfide — the noxious and highly corrosive compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs.
I’ve written in the past about how SRBs can munch right through tough metals, such as the stainless-steel pressure vessels in nuclear-power plants. Key to the bugs’ destructiveness is their acquiring a protective biofilm to isolate them from the oxygenated water.
You see, SRBs don’t thrive in the presence of oxygen. So they tend to emigrate to a metal surface and then invite other families of microbes to join their community. The newcomers build a protective outer layer, a biofilm, above the SRBs. This shield not only does a good job of barring the infiltration of oxygen, but also any germ killers that might later be seeded into the water.
Once a biofilm forms, SRBs are free to eat away at copper (or any other metallic meal) with impunity. At which point routing them becomes, well —  mighty challenging.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Short business travel tips with flights

Been doing a fair bit of traveling lately, so here a few thoughts regarding short trips.
I think you want to go all-carry-on if you can. Saves time, less risk of losing your stuff, less pain and suffering lugging equipment around. “Your enjoyment on a trip is inversely proportional to the amount of luggage you take.” Most of the tips are with this goal in mind:
  • Always bring a book when flying. All electronic devices are restricted at certain times on the flight, and space is too limited to work anyway. Even if the flight has an in-flight entertainment system, the system may crash, it has annoying commercials that take forever to get through, and it will be turned off and rebooted at various times on the run-way. Use a book to get through the dead-time. Libraries are free
  • If travelling alone, consider getting a second tiny, pocket-sized book. You can bring it when you’re stuck waiting alone at the restaurant for food to cook, cooling your heels at the client’s lobby, etc.
  • Pack earbud-style headphones on the flight just in case you want to use the in-flight entertainment.
  • If expensing food, it may be easier to buy a snack before you get on the plane so you can get a receipt. If you’re worried about not being able to get food, pack a snack for yourself before you go
  • Bring earplugs onto the plane. You may want to sleep, or tune out the annoying kid behind you
  • Rushing for a plane sucks. Get to the airport early, buy a snack, and relax
  • Get all-arounder shoes: good enough for business settings, but comfy and protected from the elements. You may want to save these shoes just for demanding situations and wear your more vulnerable dress shoes in the office
  • Similarly, do you have pants and shirts that can do double-duty? Now is the time for your wrinkle-resistant, stain-resistant clothes
  • If unsure about the weather, or flying between hot and cold climates, use layers to beat the cold. T-shirt + shirt + sweater + vest + light rain jacket with rain hood and a warm hat in the pocket will get you from summer to almost-winter
  • A rain-jacket with hood can remove the need for an umbrella
  • A pilates band is a portable way to work out on the road, if you’re not staying somewhere with a pool or weight room
  • Rental cars rarely come with maps, so bring some along. (Try the library, google maps print-outs, etc.) You can often rent a GPS with a rental car. Having the postal code of all your destinations is an easy way to input destinations to the GPS. You can use the preloaded GPS information to find restaurants and attractions if you did not prepare beforehand
  • Have a USB stick just in case. Pre-load it with any critical files. Even if bringing a laptop, have the USB as a back-up
  • Buy small capsule containers you can fill with pills. Don’t bring full bottles. Bring minimal medicine and buy more over there if an unexpected illness comes up read more…
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Smart Process Design

If you took somebody’s advice and subscribed to Cheresources.com you had better read THIS article on keeping yourself on the mailing list.  They are moving to a new website platform and seem to be trying to draw more people to their community. So you’ve got to create a user account to keep receiving e-mails. (Even if you never use it to post anything yourself).
On that note, they have a few users starting to blog. Two interesting picks from “Ankur” that could prove especially helpful to students or new workers:

 Background
First let us recall what process simulation programs can do well. Simulators perform heat and mass balances. They also use data on chemical species and thermodynamic methods to perform calculations which can estimate thermodynamic properties. For streams with only a few discrete chemical species this is usually no problem: they have been studied, and the program can look up all the coefficients and values to use in calculations to predict their properties. Assuming you set the program up properly, of course. Some methods will be the same ones you used in your thermo courses in school, and others will have added factors which are too annoying to do by hand but easily treated by a computer.
But you cannot look up component data for crude oil, which is full of literally thousands of complex molecules that are practically impossible to individually identify. Simulators get around this by creating “pseudo-components,” a slate of “fake” chemical species that together to try model the overall properties of the oil. The “pseudo-components” will have different boiling points, viscosities, etc., and the point is that by boiling, mixing, and combining these pseudo-components, you get an overall decent idea of how the oil streams in a refinery will act. When you distill the oil, your pseudo-components will also be distilled, and the disposition of the pseudo-components will try to predict the resulting product properties.
However, there are some chemical engineering problems where this whole approach falls down:
  • Asphalt processes (boiling points too high for open literature sources, no way to model some processes)
  • Lubricating oils (relies on aromatic chemistry and unusual solvents that cannot be modeled adequately)
  • Aromatic extraction (again, highly non-ideal chemistry that may not be covered in most simulators)
  • Chemical treatment processes, where an acid or base is used to “wash” away impurities like thiols/mercaptans, asphalts, odor, etc.
  • Diffusion/Adsorption processes like pressure swing adsorption
If you do have one of these processes, you’ll need special insider information to set up custom calculations to get around the problem. (Like the help of a technology vendor who sells the process and has loads of laboratory and operational experience). It’s not impossible to model, but don’t expect to do it out-of-the-box with your typical simulation program.
In your simulation, you may be able to use a cheap “hack” to work around the problem. For example, sometimes in preliminary simulations I will use simple splitters or “spreadsheet” operations to remove XX% of the H2 from a stream as a stand-in for my hydrogen pressure swing adsorber. This may let me get some rough working idea of what will happen, and the model can be improved with vendor data later on.

Design of Quiet Air-Cooled Heat Exchangers

Many industrial facilities are required to meet stringent noise requirements. These requirements are imposed to protect workers’ hearing and/or to meet community ordinances. The facility designer must pay careful attention to the noise level of all industrial equipment, including air-cooled heat exchangers.
Air-cooled heat exchangers are a source of plant noise. Therefore, it is important to design each unit to produce the minimum amount of noise while still meeting the thermal requirements at a reasonable cost.

This paper discusses the major noise sources of an air-cooled heat exchanger, the factors affecting the noise from each source, and how the source affects the overall noise level of the air-cooled heat exchanger.

Pitting Corrosion - Mechanism & Prevention

Pitting Corrosion on Metal Surface
Pitting is one of the most destructive forms of corrosion as it will potential cause equipment failures due to perforation / penetration. pitting generally occurs on metal surfaces protected by oxide film such as Stainless steel, aluminum, etc. Typically for boiler and feed water system, pitting corrosion rate increase dramatically with the increase of oxygen content in the fluid.

Pitting can occur in any metal surfaces. Following are some pictures of pitting corrosion
.Mechanism
Lets look at figure below, oxygen rich fluid in contact with metal surface (at the top of the pit) will becomes the cathode. At the bottom of the pit, low in oxygen level becomes the anode. this will form a complete circuit where metal at the pit (FE) will be ionized to release electron (e) and form ion Ferum (FE2+), this electron will travel to the top of pit to react with Oxygen (O2) (and water, H2O) to form ion hydroxides (OH-). Ion Ferum (FE2+) will react with ion hydroxides (OH-) to form Ferum Oxide (Fe2O3) which typically a brown rust. Deeper the pit leeser the oxygen content and higher the potential and pitting corrosion rate. 
Knowing that pitting can cause failure due to perforation while the total corrosion, as measured by weight lossm might be rather minimal, experience shown that rate of penetration may be 10 to 100 times that by general corrosion, pitting corrosion has been considered to be more dangerous than the uniform corrosion damage because it is very difficult to detect, predict and design against. General metal weight loss method almost impossible to detect the internal pitting corrosion.

Pitting corrosion shape
Pits formed due to pitting corrosion can become wide and shallow or narrow and deep which can rapidly perforate the wall thickness of a metal. Following picture demonstrate several types of pitting corrosion shape. This has made it even more difficult to be detected especially undercutting, subsuface and horizontal type.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

White House Plumbing

President George Bush can take modern conveniences for granted. The White House is like a super hotel that contains all the high-tech appliances available. It's part of the perks that go along with being the leader of the free world. And among the least of his worries is whether the plumbing works.
But the President's home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue hasn't always been a posh address. In fact, many presidents had to tolerate primitive living conditions, including poor plumbing and heating.
The White House had a reputation for being behind the times in domestic improvements. Congress in part can be blamed for that situation, because although the White House is a private residence for the President and his family, it is public property, and appropriations decisions were made on Capitol Hill. Frequently, the necessary expenditures weren't allotted, and the building decayed rapidly in the first half of the 20th century. Before its major renovation during the Harry S. Truman administration in 1948, it was in such rough shape that officials discussed tearing it down and replacing it with a completely new building.
White House History: Every president except George Washington has lived in the White House. Although the "Father of Our Country” didn't reside there, he was instrumental in the location of the site as well as in the establishment of the Federal City in the District of Columbia, which would be named after him following his death in 1799. Originally named "The President's House," it was known as such until the Civil War (1861-65), when it assumed the name, “Executive Mansion." Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) established the title, "White House," by Executive Order.
The residence was built on a hill overlooking the Potomac River. A contest was held for the design of the building. Irish architect James Hoban, who is called the first architect of the White House, won the $500 prize. The design is said to have been based on that of the Duke of Leinster's palace in Dublin.
The cornerstone of the White House was laid on Oct.12, 1792---the 300th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the Western Hemisphere. But it wasn't until November 1800 that second President John Adams (1797-1801) and his wife Abigail moved in. When the Adamses arrived, much of the house was disheveled from ongoing construction---most notably the East Room. Since there was no plumbing of any sort, servants had to lug water into the house from a spring in Franklin Park, five city blocks away. There were no bathrooms, and an agitated Mrs. Adams complained that "we had not the least fence, yard or other convenience without, and the great unfinished audience room, I made a drying room of---nor were there enough lusters or lamps, so candles were stuck here and there for light---neither the chief staircase nor the outer steps were completed, so the family had to enter the house by temporary wooden stairs and platform."
When the British raided Washington on Aug. 24, 1814, they torched the White House, and the blaze gutted the interior and damaged part of the exterior. Dolly Madison was able to salvage some items, including the Declaration of Independence and the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.
Reconstruction commenced in the spring of 1815, again under Hoban's guidance. Except for the East Room and the North and South Porticoes, restoration was finished in December 1817.
There have been several alterations since the White House was rebuilt after the 1814 fire. The first significant alteration was a $500,000 project in 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt administration. The principal innovation was the construction of the West Wing, where the executive offices were moved and where they remain today. Separating the residence and business quarters, allowed for the second floor to be used solely as a domicile.
Because there was a restricted amount of money available for this renovation, as well as limited time and the crude equipment of 1902, it was impossible to do all of the work that needed to be done. Nevertheless, plumbing was a central part of the plan, as bathrooms were installed and pipes and electrical wiring replaced as part of the first floor refurbishment. In order to safeguard the attic from fire, workers installed a new standpipe with fire hose that ascended into the attic and out to a place where the city fire department could easily use it in case of fire.
The ensuing report explained, "In the house proper, more than one half of the lower floors is given up to dressing rooms, with toilet rooms attached, conveniences heretofore entirely lacking. The removal of the pipes from the corridor gives a spacious passageway dignified by the fine architectural features constructed by Hoban."
In 1927, a new steel-trussed roof and fire-resistant third floor were installed during the Calvin Coolidge administration (1923-29). However, these improvements provided only temporary relief and the house had deteriorated rapidly by the time Truman authorized major reconstruction in 1948. One account notes that the President's decision was prompted by his noticing that his bathtub was settling into the floor.
Reconstruction 1948-52: By 1948, it was apparent that the weary White House was in serious disrepair and that if it didn't get a much-needed facelift, it would have to be demolished. So President Truman (1945-1953) authorized the formation of a committee to oversee the rebuilding process.
The Commission on Renovation of the Executive Mansion was faced with the immediate responsibility of deciding between several possible plans for reconstruction---none of them simple, all of them costly and all requiring much time.
Comprising the committee were R. E. Dougherty, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers; Douglas W. Orr, president of the American Institute of Architects; and W. E. Reynolds, commissioner of Public Buildings. Lorenzo S. Wilson, White House architect, and Howell G. Crim, chief White House usher, acted as advisors. John McShain was the general contractor for the project.
During the renovation, the Trumans lived at the government-owned Blair House across the street. It took nearly all of Truman's second term in office to complete the work.
The $5.7 million project was the most extensive the building had undergone in the 150 years it had been in existence. Architectural Digest noted in a pre-construction article that had there not been the addition of so many pipes and wires through the years, the structure would have been in satisfactory condition.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Pipe Factory

WELCOME TO THE GUBBELS SITE

The Royal Dutch Pipe Factorypipe factory Elbert Gubbels & Sons B.V. is the only manufacturer of briarroot tobacco pipes in the Benelux countries where pipes of high quality are made under the brands Big Ben, Hilson, Royal Dutch and Amphora. We also supply numerous smokers' accessories of high quality.

We gladly invite you to have a look at our products. Our registered customers can get access to the order system by entering their ID-code and password. This order system also indicates the specific prices of each individual customer and the articles previously bought via the internet.

We thank you for visiting this site!