Water Brake Dyno Question

[Jason@ASU]

Hey guys, we have a Go-Power Systems Water Brake that I have a few questions on.

-Do you connect the outlet of the brake to the sewer? I am assuming that the inlet is just plummed to the city water and the outlet to a drain that goes to the sewer. Is this correct?

-How long does a typical dyno test take? I know that this is a rather broad question...

The issue that we have here is that our school is reluctant to plumb our water for us because they are concerned about us "wasting water". So, I am going to attempt quantify our estimated water usage based on an very rough estimated flow of 11 GPM. Any help here is appreciated.

-Jason

[David Money]

That is how our guys did the plumbing in the past. The only problem was that they got in trouble by the university for dumping sooo much hot water down the drain. Something about EPA.

Our university is about to throw our Go-Power Dyno away. If anybody wants it, it would probably be up for grabs for real cheap. It's just a basic test stand dyno donated to our university by Southwest Research Institute.

[Alan Gruner]

When I used a waterbrake dyno back in school, I always hated the fact that we were dumping so much fresh water down the drain. This was in Michigan where there are not same water scarcity problems that you have in Arizona.

This may be a stupid idea, but I always thought that if you could find someone who would donate an old above-ground swimming pool, you could cover it and use as a holding tank to recirculate water as much as you wanted.

This never would have worked in Michigan because the water would have been frozen by the middle of November. /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

FSAE alumni
Non-professional weekend autocrosser

[Kevin Hall]

This is also the way our setup is currently run. We dump all the water down the drain. The possibility for recirculating here would involve taking up space with a tank, and that just wouldn't happen. So until we get something better, Canada's over-zealous supply of fresh water will be another donation to our team.

Good luck

[Jason@ASU]

Thanks for the replies. So, the next thing that I need to do is figure out how much water I will be using per year. Can you guys give me an idea of about how long a typical dyno run lasts and a rough estimate of how many per year?

[David Money]

We were suppossed to be using 2 heat exchangers outside the building, but we would never get the maintenance guys to hook it up. As a result of getting rid of our dyno, we don't need them either. If ya want em.....

[U of S Engine]

Well, consider 3 hours at a crack, on a daily basis for a month. That makes 90 hours of dynoing, which I think is MORE than enough to make an engine run really well if you have some tuning experience.

[Jason@ASU]

-Regarding the heat exchangers: Were you planning on recirculating the water instead of just dumping it? I am new to water brakes but if I understand correctly, one way to plumb it would be to have city water coming into the brake and then plumb the outlet to the sewer. If I understand what you are saying, I could also maybe recirculate some fixed amount of water and cool it using a heat exchanger? Obviously I would have to use a pump to flow the water but this sounds like an interesting idea. What is the most common way to plumb these things?

-As for the dyno time estimate, thanks for the info. I will use this to try and come up with some conclusion that I can pass on to our facilities people.

[David Money]

We never got so far as to plumb up to the heat exchangers. Work had to be done by the univ maintenance dept, and they needed a work order, and the univ wouldn't issue a work order because they didn't know where (from what account) to pull the money from. University politics at it's best!!!

You'd need soem sort of recirc pump, and the heat exchangers we have use fans to blow accross the coils. I believe they were looking at plumbing them in series for maximum dT.

[David Money]

Guys, it looks like the university doesn't allow the dyno to be donated or even sold for some reason. Instead, it has to be thrown away. Sorry for misleading anybody if I did. It just seemed like the logical thing to do to have it go to somebody who needed it instead of a landfill. I will never understand university politics, oh well...