Bruges Booze tubes to pump LOVELY BEER underneath city The Belgian city of Bruges has approved plans to build a pipeline which will funnel beer underneath its famous cobbled streets. Locals and politicians were fed up with huge lorries clattering through the cobbled streets and tiny canal paths of the picturesque city and decided to connect the De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling …
IAUNABPE but
Flow = 1500 gallons per hour = 1.89e-3 m3s-1
Velocity = 2 miles in 15 minutes = 12.9 km per hour = 3.58ms-1
Area = 1.89e-3 / 3.58 = 0.000528m2
Radius = sqrt (0.000528/pi) = 0.013 m
Diameter = 0.026m = 2.6 cm.
I Am Unfortunately Not A Beer Pipe Engineer but ... I reckon allowing for resistance you're still only looking at a 2" pipe or so.
I can't stop myself now. Oh dear, oh dear.
1500 gallons/hour is 1.84 Litres/sec
Velocity is about 3.5 m/s
I must confess I don't have charts for beer, only water. I'm using my trusty IOP Plumbing Engineering Services Design Guide.
But you won't be using a small pipe, as frictional resistance is going to be huge.
If you used a 50mm (2") copper/steel pipe, the frictional resistance would be 0.02m per metre run of pipe. Tiny you say? Aha, but run that for around 3,000m? You have a pressure drop of 60m, i.e. 6 bar. So you'd need a seriously chunky pump.
Therefore I'd suggest using at least a 76mm (3") pipe, which gives a frictional resistance of 0.004m/m - and a pressure drop of 1.2 bar. I'd have thought that pumping beer too hard might not be good for it, so you might even consider a 4" pipe. After all, the cost comes in digging the trench, the actual pipe is quite a small proportion of that.
To add a further complication, plastic pipe has thicker walls. You might choose to use multi-layer pipe for this job, in which case you tend to go up one pipesize.
Just to be silly, if you used 1" pipe, the frictional resistance at 1.8 L/sec is 0.5m/m. So the pressure drop over 2 miles would be 150 bar.
Bruges has got some steep hills. So it may be that you can just run the pipe downhill. It's certainly a steep walk from the town centre to the station.
I wonder what the risk is of the locals tapping into the pipe enroute?
Brugge (the town name that the locals use) means "bridges". The town is called "bridges" 'cos there are 10's of the things crossing the river and canals around which the city is built. Many of these bridges are old and not designed for modern heavy traffic. Which is why the council don't want lorries full of heavy beer crossing them or using the cobbled streets that surround them. Remember that road wear is proportional to the 4th power of the mass of the vehicle causing it.
So, no hills.
(PS why do the British insist on calling towns and cities in Flanders by their (hated) French names)
it's our language so we can do what we want... I suppose. You could then go on to ask why the Flemish insist on using their own strange names for Wallonian towns.
More interesting yet is that we use the French language version for Bruges but we call the near by related Zeebrugge (Bruges-on-sea) by the Flemish name.
Still no hills though but yes, plenty of bridges and cobbled streets in the old part of the town.
Wipers** is a lot easier than the inevitable Leper and a lot kinder if you ask me,
IMHO the reason for us brits preferring to use the French names is that bits of our language come from French (1066 and all that) and a lot more of us speak at least a few words of it than we do Flemish/Dutch/whatever.
** Four of my great uncles are listed on the Meni Gate and one at Tyne Cot so that part of the world is well known to my Family. The name of the British military newspaper published there was the Wipers Times.
Beer contains dissolved CO2 gas. Those gas bubbles actually INCREASE the friction present in the piping. You effectively need a supercomputer to model the resultant "Two Phase Flow" of beer, soda etc. Regular sizing calculations do not work as expected as the viscosity and density will fluctuate with any change in flow rate, pressure or temperature. Even the variety of beer will change all the physical properties for flow calculations.
The correct velocity will be MUCH less than used with water, any elbows should be large sweep type or even custom bent and the piping should be all welded and highly polished 316 SST. Valves need to be crevice free and full port Ball type. Don't forget the pipe "cleanouts" so the beer stone can be removed.
I don't suggest centrifigal pumps, "peristaltic" pumps might be good or ejector style (air over hydraulic) as they are more gentle to the fluid.
Just ask yourself do you put your beer in a blender and what happens to it after you do it?
Otherwise there will be a lot of flat beer.
There are three things that give head in Belgium, only one of them includes beer taps.
After all, what is the point of extracting the beer from deep underground wells, pumping it to a bottling plant, and then transporting it by truck or lorry to the pub, when you could pump it directly from the bowels of the earth to the pub, cutting out the middlemen and preserving the wonderful freshness of it...
The problem is that people have heard about these underground beer aquifers and misunderstood. This is why so many pubs connect the large plastic pipes they find underground directly to their lager pumps. Not realising that these pipes link to the outlet of their urinals. Fortunately no one has yet noticed...
But there is a reason why there's a whole section of the 1999 Water Regulations dedicate to the correct marking and colour coding of pipes.
The interesting question is which came first. Was it the belgian chocolate miners who first stubled across the beer wells? Or was it people drilling for beer who found the rich seams of chocolate to mine? Bruges is certainly a rich source of both.
The problem is that people have heard about these underground beer aquifers and misunderstood. This is why so many pubs connect the large plastic pipes they find underground directly to their lager pumps. Not realising that these pipes link to the outlet of their urinals. Fortunately no one has yet noticed...
Once every two weeks or so I see a beer tanker from a large brewery replenishing the cisterns of a conference centre near where I work. The pipe joint is under a manhole cover; there are three more in close proximity, but none of them is marked 'beer' or 'not beer', and anyway, he could just use one of the others to get rid of the beer, it won't make any difference. But then, why bother driving out from the brewery in the first place? Don't they have sewers?
Glass of locally-brewed and bottled stuff, instead.
"when you could pump it directly from the bowels of the earth to the pub"
Invade Belgium - NOW!!!!
Belgians have been terrorising honest, decent upstanding British (but not you bastard Scots) people for far too long, this tyrrany should be stopped at once!!
We, of the once United Klingondoms, are ready to send in as many of other countries troops as is required.
The threat of an increase in power of this beer-rich country has already decimated house prices.
Police and secret service types yesterday warned that the planned beer pipeline would be likely to give rise to a whole new and scary breed of terrorists, who were determined to attack the pipeline at all cost, coerced in strange sermons called 'dares' by barely intelligible, ritually inebriated 'mates' in dark dens of depravity called 'pubs', increasing the risk of terrorism a thousand fold or even more. Apparently there are millions of these potential terrorists. You could be one of them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
