At Rocketdyne, test engineers were required to safety inspect other test engineers’ setups prior to activation and to sign-off accordingly. (We also did this for Manufacturing’s own setups.) Working o/t one Saturday, I was tapped to inspect a setup within our own department. The setup’s engineer and tech were in the control room, munching on breakfast donuts, and already had one particular line – proofed long ago and rated for 5000 psig safe operating pressure – pressurized to less than 500 psig to start off the inspection with a low-pressure leak check. The tech and I together walked into the test cell and saw this: The high-pressure flexible line’s outer sleeve had delaminated from the line’s inner structure at one particular location which led to the void created between the two to be pressurized to the shape and approximate size of a basketball… and that to the point of semi-transparency. The tech and I said nothing as we immediately wheeled around and ran out of the cell. Note that the line was bright orange, so my particular description of the failure point’s resemblance was reinforced. We had never seen or heard of that sort of failure mode, and we chuckled about it later… but for the 3 seconds that we were exposed to that thing…
Well I guess technically it’s only an inner tube when installed in a tire. Otherwise it’s just a very large hemorrhoid cushion.
The volume is growing linearly with time. Under the assumption that it grows equally in all directions (which is only an approximation, but looks pretty good, looking at the videos), the diameter is growing as time^{1/3}. (Whose derivative is proportional to time^{-2/3}, though I’m not quite sure how to pick that up from visual cues.)
I eyeballed the times when this passed multiples of 6" and fitted a cube root to that data (with a shift on the time, since the tube doesn’t start with 0 air). You’re welcome.
That’s terrifying.
At my last ft employer, the idiot that replaced me for head of production demanded that a worker use a non pressure-rated hose to pump hot grain mash (ca. 180° F) up a 9’ vertical rise because the “engineer” (he was a pipe fitter) had decided to mount the mash chiller on the ceiling. The hose exploded of course, showering both crew members with scalding mash, which caused one to trip over the pump and break his finger (and maybe dislocate his elbow? It’s been a while). The “engineer” proceeded to mount a new ferrule on the same hose and commence with the stupidity. It was unchanged when I left that place.
Jeez. What you described explains why our test/research/development department was given the responsibility of checking up on Manufacturing’s doings: They kept over-pressurizing production hardware and test equipment to the point where they were being damaged up to the point of being destroyed. And some of that without employing standard safeguards or even a test cell. It took one destroyed SSME main combustion chamber to finally get Mahogany Row elites’ attention.
Yeah, um… we basically work in the same industry and my job is totally as cool as yours.
I’d like to see a Space Shuttle engine filled with hot mash. Couldn’t operate much worse than Starship.
It would probably cut my workday in half! Or my body…
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