1 Water and Steam Hammer Phenomena

This topic encompasses a rich assortment of transient hydraulic phenomena, every one of which can mean bad news for the design engineer. Water hammer and its cousin steam hammer have well-known potential for causing disastrous accidents.

The topic can be as difficult as it is rich. One could spend a lifetime analyzing endless unique fluid transient situations, wading hip-deep in partial differential equations in the complex domain, or plowing through “methods of characteristics” diagrams and matrices of equations, or setting up more and more complicated 3-D grids for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Time consuming and expensive!

But thankfully, 99 times out of 100, difficult analysis is unnecessary for our purposes.