Maintenance personnel are busy people, so when their piping is making noise, they don’t have time for lengthy troubleshooting. How can they quickly determine the cause? Having the proper diagnostic tools is a great start.
Identifying the Problem
In many cases, water hammer is the culprit, and it will make itself known by loudly pummeling the pipes or causing pressure spikes/vacuums. Unfortunately, you’ll only notice these manifestations if you’re near the pipe or pressure gauge when they occur.
Although, the most obvious (and expensive) indicator of water hammer is broken equipment. Instrumentation, check valves, pumps, and/or gauges are costly and time-consuming to replace. Not to mention the impact of system downtime, loss of product, and sometimes even environmental effects.
Water hammer is commonly associated with spikes in pressure; however, it's crucial to recognize that low-pressure surges are equally capable of causing significant damage. Such dips in pressure can result in the warping or even the ejection of a bladder from a surge tank, in addition to the potential for complete pipe collapse.
In the context of drinking water systems, where the standard operating pressure range is between 60-80 psi, a fall below 20 psi could open the door for external pollutants to infiltrate the water pipes. It is under these circumstances that communities are often advised to boil their water as a precautionary measure.
It’s obvious that monitoring your system’s pressure spikes and dips before major damage is done should be top of mind.
The Solution: Transient Monitoring
Transient monitoring is a diagnostic tool that helps your maintenance team receive near real-time data. It measures and records pressures at a scan rate high enough to capture the full extent of transient pressures happening at a specific system location.
Transient Monitoring Devices (also called data loggers) are used for:
- Providing additional pressure information other than SCADA
- Capturing pressure impact from events such as pump trips, valve closures, et. al.
- Forensic engineering/risk assessment
- Computer model calibration or proof of design
However, not all transient monitoring devices are created equal. The Blacoh SurgeWave™ Defender transient monitoring device automatically detects when a pressure surge, pressure spike, or water hammer event occurs. Steady state data can be recorded up to 1x/second while transient data is recorded 100x/second for true-to-life sampling (and stored in the cloud), giving maintenance personnel the most accurate information as quickly as possible. Connect it to your system anywhere where there’s a liquid filled tap at:
- Pumps
- Check valves
- Pressure Reducing, Back Pressure, or Flow Control Valves
- Cross connection control devices
- Long runs of pipe
- Air vacuum valve inlet
- Pressure relief valve inlet
- Pulsation Dampener inlet, Inlet stabilizers, and surge vessels
Transient monitoring can also be used to verify actual operating conditions against design allowances for maximum and minimum pressure.
Need Help? Blacoh's Experts are Here!
To learn more about transient monitoring and its benefits for your fluid piping systems, watch our webinar series on water hammer, Transient Monitoring and Surge Vessels.
Click here to watch our Surge Vessels webinar.
Click here to watch our Demystifying Water Hammer webinar.
Click here to watch our Transient Monitoring webinar.