'Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Architecture'
Abstract
Sudden change of flow conditions in a pipeline may cause the flow to become time dependent and would start an undesirable physical phenomenon called water hammer. These sudden changes can be caused by variety of scenarios and some of them include valve operations (opening or closing), sudden power loss at pump stations and load rejections or load acceptance at the turbines, etc. Because of its very costly to solve, and sometimes deadly results, it is quite important that transient scenarios be considered for pipe systems at design stage to ensure safety and longevity of them. The present study is an attempt to develop a comprehensive computer software that is capable of simulating, analysing and solving most commonly encountered fluid transient events. The ultimate goal of the study is to have a local computer program to be used in our country, instead of buying expensive software from abroad in this field. Thus, the code developed in the present study will be enhanced further in the future with the contributions of others. However, in its current form, the code is already capable of using many boundary conditions to tackle a large variety of problems involving fluid transients. Within the code, the Method of Characteristics are used to solve the basic unsteady pipe flow equations. The code developed is titled as H-Hammer and it utilizes AutoCAD, Visual Basic 6.0 and MS Excel all together for the purpose of analyses. The accuracy of the software was tested by solving some existing problems offered in the important textbooks written in the field by those who contributed significantly in the fluid transient area. Comparisons of the results show that the results of the developed software is in good agreement with the solutions given in those books.M.S. - Master of Scienc