They don’t think big, do they?
"Keith said he didn’t quite understand the intercoolers.
‘That’s all right,’ said the chief engineer patiently. ‘The cold river water comes in here from the main, picks up heat, and comes out here, and back into the river. The oil comes in here, and goes out here, a whole lot cooler.’
Keith said he understood that. ‘What puzzles me is the heat transfer balance,’ he said. ‘I take it that the hydraulic fluid goes into the intercooler at a hundred and ten degrees? That’s the maximum temperature you work at?’
‘That’s so,’ said the chief engineer. ‘In the case of the biggest motors that would be the outgoing temperature.’
‘And it goes into the power generator about eighty degrees?’
‘More or less.’
Keith stared at the drawing, still puzzled. ‘Well, what’s the temperature rise in the cooling water, then?’
The chief engineer glanced at his aide. Mr Monnington said, ‘Fifty degrees. Fifty-five under extreme conditions.’
Puzzled, Keith said, ‘It can’t go higher than the temperature of the oil, or it couldn’t do any cooling. What’s the inlet temperature of the water?’
‘Fifty degrees,’ said Mr Monnington. Emmanuel stirred, but left the talking to Keith.
‘That seems on the cold side for summer temperature,’ said Keith.
‘It’s general in these rivers,’ said the engineer. ‘Maybe you don’t get the same conditions in England. This is snow water, made by melting the eternal snows upon the Glacier Peak.’
Emmanuel leaned forward on the table. ‘That’s baloney,’ he said candidly. ‘Flume River doesn’t rise from Glacier Peak. Flume River rises in the Troublesome Mountain, not much higher than five thousand feet. All the snow’s gone from Troublesome by the end of April, most years.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Tell you sump’n. I went fishing up the Flume two years ago, in August, ten or fifteen miles above the Eight Mile Cut. Trout fishing. We didn’t catch anything because the water was too hot, the fish wouldn’t stir. So there was only one thing to be done, see? We stripped off, ’n went in for a swim. Real warm it was — I stayed in half an hour or more. I guess the water in that river, in the Flume, the one we’re talking of — I guess it was seventy-five degrees or more, that day.’
There was a dead silence in the conference room of Ferris Hydraulics, Inc."
Trustee from the Toolroom - Nevil Shute
It seem like back in the day of "The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire", some poor seaman was logging the surface temperature of every ocean they sailed. Too bad no one thought to look it up!"
"Experience is the best Teacher...but, if you can accept it Second Hand, the Tuition is less!" - Moishe Rosen