Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Pressure Drop - Part 2

In the previouse article, I wrote about good and bad pressure drop and briefly explained about why we care about it from the beginning stage and while operating the plants or facilities. Here I'll further share about how can we utilize the pressure drop.

The pressure drop again as highlighted in previous article is actually due to the friction along the piping. In the meantime, it is not a significant losses relative to equipments. As we all aware there is allowable pressure drop for all the equipments such a way that pumps or compresssors can be sized properly to reach destination pressure. All the equipments need to be sized so that the pressure drop calculated is not beyond the allowable pressure drop. How does usually this pressure drop is affected or can affect the size/design of equipment? It is exactly same as happen to piping but than much larger pressure drop relative to friction losses. So, it is actually same principal where the friction losses inside the equipment as higher velocity will give higher losses. For new design, the equipment can be designed so that the calculated pressure drop lower than allowable. Unfortunately, what would happen if the equipment designed is giving higher pressure drop than allowable? How it can be rectified? Does it mean that the whole equipment need to be revamped?

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