While Sir Winston was a great man in his own right, I wonder if he didn't sort of borrow conscious or otherwise the quite good opening statement from a Spanish/American philosopher born a little earlier?,
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (Mr.
George Santayana, before 1905?)
Randy Conner
-----Original Message-----
From: PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com [mailto:PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of Paul Bowers
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 9:37 PM
To: pipingdesign@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [PipingDesign] John Luf Piping Flexibility Analysis Chapter One
John has seen fit to permit me to post some excerpts from his upcoming book.
Paul
Chapter 1
"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it"... Sir
Winston Churchill.
The industrial age...
As western civilization in the latter part of the twentieth century began to realize the advantages that automation, and standardization gave their economies one of the key components need was motive power. Motive power was required to drive the machinery of the new industrial revolution and the simplest type of power available was steam.
Steam was easy enough to generate and use in expansion engines, such as James Watts water cooled expansion engine circa 1770 this device proved to be the power source that was required for industry and its motive source of power was steam.
This need for steam drove the construction of power boilers. As power needs grew, temperatures and pressures slowly increased in steam systems, these slow increases led finally to a series of catastrophic events, which initiated the creation of standards and codes.
Because of the lack of standards and codes each engineer, designer and constructor took different approaches to those items that determined the
worth of their efforts. Factors of safety, design rules, strength of materials as well as standardized materials were all unknown. In a sense each individual or manufacturer were on their own some concerns were more qualified and conscious of safety then others... cheapest or most expensive all operated on their own.
At the very end of the prolonged and brutal United States Civil War (the
first "modern" war where rifling caused massive amounts of casualties another byproduct of the Industrial Revolution) the riverboat Sultana on
April 27th, 1865 was being propelled Northbound on the Mississippi river
(overloaded with 2200 souls on board) with newly released Northern Prisoners of War from the Confederate States of Americas' Andersonville camp. Three of the four power boilers exploded leading to the loss of over 1758 persons. This was the greatest loss of life in the United States Maritime to date (The Titanics' loss by comparisons was 1517 persons). Formal investigation never determined the root cause of the failure theories include insufficient repairs, sudden boiling phenomena due to low water and listing.
Other Power Boiler explosions also occurred causing large losses of life
and property, in mines, factories and other locations, there were 441 explosions between the years of 1867-1868. Part of the cause of increasing problems was the steady increase in pressures and temperatures seen in the systems being used....
In 1883 the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) created a committee on standards and gages. That same year members of the ASME proposed that a set of codified "code" rules should be drawn up for boiler tests.
Finally after two other boiler catastrophes one on March 10, 1905 in
Brockton Massachusetts that left 58 dead and large capital damage the
State of Massachusetts adopted the ASME boiler code, other states soon
followed. Early critics comments of the new code were typical.... "Too
complex"... Too Costly"...etc. But as time went on the loss of death
and
destruction caused widespread adoption of the ASME Boiler code.
As time went on boilers and unfired pressure vessel explosions were no longer problematic but the interconnecting piping systems started to show their shortcomings...
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