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Hydraulic calculations and
the slide rule
Before the scientific calculators and computers, we still 8
produced hydraulic calculations for High Hazard sprinkler systems but this
was a long-winded and time-consuming process and prone to error. I say
High Hazard sprinkler systems as these were the only systems you would
consider producing hydraulic calculations for as the production of the
calculations by hand took so long that we were content in using pre-
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Hydraulic calculations and the slide rule Page 2 of 7
calculated pipe table for Light hazard and Ordinary hazard sprinkler
systems and no one had ever thought of installing sprinklers into a house or
care facility.
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Even with a scientific calculator you still have a lot of buttons which need to
be press to solve the Hayes William pressure loss formula (/Hydraulic-
calculation-for-fire-protection-engineers/the-hazen-williams-formula-for-
use-in-fire-sprinkler-systems.html), after all, each time we need to enter the
pipe diameter, the flow rate and the C factor of the pipe. Of course, we can
simplify the Hayes and William pressure loss formula for any pipe by
producing a k-factor for each pipe size and pipe type, this certainly
simplifies the input when using a calculate but we then need to look it up in
a table so it is still quite laborious. If this was not enough we have not even
considered the K-Factor formula (/Hydraulic-calculation-for-fire-
protection-engineers/k-factor-formula.html) for working out the flow
through the sprinkler head or balancing the junction points at each tee or
cross which needed yet another adjustment calculation. As an aside who
thought it was a good idea to have “K” and “k” as two different formulas in
fire sprinkler calculations, did someone not think that this may be confusing!
The use of a hydraulic slide rule was still a useful tool even after the
invention of the scientific calculator, you may be wondering why! Well, it
was just simpler especially for those quick estimates and I still know a few
fire sprinkler engineers which still rely on their trusted slide rule to this day.
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The downside to the hydraulic slide rule and the programmable calculator
is that it was still only possible to calculate a branch (tree) systems with
dead-end lines, we could not calculate looped or gridded networks. You
can, in fact, calculate a simple loop system with little maths, paper and pen
and a loop can provide additional efficiency with the advantage that it
delivers water by more than one route and therefore the flow the decrease
in each line and as the friction loss decrease is proportional to the flow to
the power of 1.85, we will return to loops in a later blog.
I know some of you will be thinking why on earth are we talking about slide
rules, times and moved on and we all use hydraulic calculation software
such as FHC produce are calculation we can optimise designs and try out
numerous permutations of pipe sizes and head K-Factor. Well, I still believe
that fire protection engineers need to understand the basic concepts of
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can blink. This now says the design engineer considerable time which
you can use optimising the system for best effect. So I don’t think
engineers spend any less time producing the calculations is just that their
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time is spent more efficiently fine-tuning their hydraulic model for best
effect and a more cost-effective solution.
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