Waterhammer Analysis—Essential and Easy (and Efficient)

Abstract

For most piping systems the maximum and minimum operating pressures occur during transient operations. Therefore it is essential to good design and operation to perform a transient analysis for normal startup and shutdown and for unplanned events such as a pump trip associated with a power outage. This author also claims that waterhammer (transient) analysis is easy. Hydraulic engineers who have studied the traditional approach to transient analysis might dispute this claim but, in fact, carrying out an analysis using the concept of pressure wave action provides an accurate, intuitive, and simple method for transient pipe system analysis of simple or complex pipe systems. Not only is this approach simple, it is extremely efficient producing accurate solutions with far fewer calculations making this approach suitable for analyzing large pipe distribution systems.