Hydraulic design safety factors.
Stuart Stanford
Tuesday 30 june 2015
12:57 - 13:00h
at Europe 1 & 2 (level 0)
Themes: (T) Water engineering, (ST) Computational methods, Poster pitches
Parallel session: Poster pitches: 5E. Engineering - Computional
As professional engineers we always strive to produce designs that are innovative, economical, sustainable, meet the client/end user needs and comply with relevant legislation and specifications. It is usual to include in these designs an acceptable margin of safety. Traditionally these safety factors were originally developed for use with manual calculations and were intended to mitigate deficiencies in the underlying theories, calculation techniques and material/physical properties. Using these historic safety factors with modern calculation techniques and theories may not be appropriate and can lead to overly conservative designs, which in turn can be expensive both in CAPEX and OPEX, resulting in higher power and carbon demands than necessary. This paper will look at the evolution of hydraulic design techniques for water/wastewater treatment plants and pipelines. The paper will identify what calculation methods are currently used and what future developments may bring and how this affects safety factors. Using case studies the paper will identify areas where conservative design is a must have and areas where it is not needed or incorrectly applied. The paper will attempt to characterise best practice for the selection of design tools and the application of safety factors. Areas requiring greater understanding and research will be highlighted.
