Its kind of a slow news day today. Thus far nothing of any real note has happened. I've been slowly, but steadily hacking away at another bid proposal, for a demineralization plant on an Indian reserve in Saskatchewan. Its been the nearly endless repetition of little changes, reprints, updates, and tweaks. I think its done, then I find something that has to be changed. In the background of this is the usual dance of pricing given, and revised between equipment suppliers. Its kind of tedious the way different players battle back and forth, chiseling an thousand dollars, here and there, off their price. It would be much easier if everyone figured out their cost, decided what the job was worth to them, and submit a price. Instead, everyone starts out insanely high, then backs off, little by little, until they reach the threshold for how little they can stand to get out of a job. I'm glad we don't do that with our computer business. What we start at is pretty much as low as we can go, so there isn't much bartering room. I hate bartering. I'm lousy at it too. Shop keepers in places like Mexico, the Dominican, etc hate me, because I don't haggle. It seems so pointless.
Toodles!
Friday, July 04, 2003
Thursday, July 03, 2003
I'm just about tired of my rotten luck.
I was driving back to Watson this afternoon. As I drove north on Highway 2, to join up with Highway 5 again, I was passed by a B train semi-trailer going in the other direction. As it passed me, it either threw something up from the road, or lost something from on top of the trailer. In any event, something large, and I think metallic, smashed into my windshield. It scared the hell out of me. I thought it was coming trough the window. It did not, but left a large, baseball sized reminder of the incident on my front windshield. It would appear I am going to SGI, again. I'm just about tired of that.
Toodles, I suppose.
I was driving back to Watson this afternoon. As I drove north on Highway 2, to join up with Highway 5 again, I was passed by a B train semi-trailer going in the other direction. As it passed me, it either threw something up from the road, or lost something from on top of the trailer. In any event, something large, and I think metallic, smashed into my windshield. It scared the hell out of me. I thought it was coming trough the window. It did not, but left a large, baseball sized reminder of the incident on my front windshield. It would appear I am going to SGI, again. I'm just about tired of that.
Toodles, I suppose.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
I am having a problem. I'm trying to design a system, according to a specification provided to me by a consulting engineer. The problem? The specification doesn't make any sense. I'll condense it down to the essential.
A system is supposed to provide 26 USgpm. This is to be supplied by two membrane trains, each sized for 13 USgpm of output water. The problem with this part of the design is, the membranes chosen for each train require a flow across them membrane that is almost in excess of what the membranes are supposed to produce. Thus, it is hard to use these membranes for such a low flow application.
Second problem, the membrane unit is supposed to be fed water by a single pump, with a redundant backup. The problem here is, this single pump is supposed to feed both trains simultaneously, or if chosen, only one train at a time. Now unless I'm missing something, this situation is impossible. A pump does only one thing. If you turn it on, it pumps at a set pressure and flow. The only way to change that is to either have a flow control valve on it, or an electronic device that controls the pump motor. A flow control valve is no possible in this case because we are never sure whether we want to restrict flow or not. At full capacity the pump will supply both trains, but if one train is valved off, for maintenance or whatever, we have to restrict output from the pump, so that it does not oversupply water to single train.
Thus, this design would seem to be impossible. Unless I'm missing something, or something was left out of the spec. The membrane chosen would actually work better if you supplied it with the full 26 USgpm, all the time, and made the membrane trains redundant, as the pump is redundant. I think I'm going to have to phone the engineer and see what we can do about this. As I sit here, I don't know how to make this work.
Toodles!
A system is supposed to provide 26 USgpm. This is to be supplied by two membrane trains, each sized for 13 USgpm of output water. The problem with this part of the design is, the membranes chosen for each train require a flow across them membrane that is almost in excess of what the membranes are supposed to produce. Thus, it is hard to use these membranes for such a low flow application.
Second problem, the membrane unit is supposed to be fed water by a single pump, with a redundant backup. The problem here is, this single pump is supposed to feed both trains simultaneously, or if chosen, only one train at a time. Now unless I'm missing something, this situation is impossible. A pump does only one thing. If you turn it on, it pumps at a set pressure and flow. The only way to change that is to either have a flow control valve on it, or an electronic device that controls the pump motor. A flow control valve is no possible in this case because we are never sure whether we want to restrict flow or not. At full capacity the pump will supply both trains, but if one train is valved off, for maintenance or whatever, we have to restrict output from the pump, so that it does not oversupply water to single train.
Thus, this design would seem to be impossible. Unless I'm missing something, or something was left out of the spec. The membrane chosen would actually work better if you supplied it with the full 26 USgpm, all the time, and made the membrane trains redundant, as the pump is redundant. I think I'm going to have to phone the engineer and see what we can do about this. As I sit here, I don't know how to make this work.
Toodles!