An Analysis of Attenuation Effect of Pressure Head Using an Air Chamber

An air chamber is design to keep the pressure from exceeding a predetermined value, or to prevent low pressures and colum separation. Therefore, it can be used to protect against rapid transients in a pipe system following abrupt pump stoppage. In this research, an air chmber was applied to a hypthetical pipe system to analyze attenuation effect of pressure head for different air volumes, locations, chamber areas, coefficients of orifice loss and pollytropic exponents. With an increase of air volume, the maximum pressure head at pump site is decreased and the minimum pressure head is imcreased. For different locations and areas of the chamber, the attenuation effects do not show much difference. Also, as the orifice loss coefficient increases, the maximum pressure head is decreased. For different polytropic exponents, isothermal process shows lower maximum pressure head than that of the adiabatic process.