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Ram pumps employ renewable energy in the form of water head to pump water, but they have performance issues that require difficult on-site testing and tuning, hence limiting their application. The current research developed a low-cost lab-scale testing system for small ram pumps' performance evaluation, tuning and leak testing. The developed system is made from available, low-cost, sensors and components. It conserves test water by setting the supply head through continuous circulation of water. The system was tested on a low-cost small sized ram pump, specially built using plumbing components. Test results demonstrated the capacity of the developed testing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the impact of lightning safety recommendations for indoor swimming pools in the U.S. It states the need to avoid all sources of water or plumbing, especially indoors to prevent serious lightning-related accidents and deaths. It also mentions the need of the expert to study the financial impact of lightning on water, specifically indoor pools and other aquatic facilities.

The purpose of our study was to investigate the biofilm formation by Legionella pneumophila serogroup1 and serogroup2-15 on plumbing materials mostly used in building water systems in Morocco. The effect of plumbing materials and temperature were examined. The Atomic Force Microscopy was used to evaluate the roughness and surface topography of the plumbing materials including galvanized steel, stainless steel, copper, Polyvinyl chloride, Polypropylene Random Copolymer and Cross-linked polyethylene. Galvanized steel surfaces supported higher numbers of bacterial cells than that the stainless steel and plastic materials at 37 than 20 and 45 °C. Non-viable counts could be obtained from the copper surfaces. L. pneumophila sg2-15 strains presented a higher ability to biofilm formation than L. pneumophila sg1. The biofilm formation was evaluated by Atomic Force Microscopy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvement of quality of sanitation services in rural settlements is an important development goal in developing countries including India and accordingly several strategies are adopted which promote the demand and use of household toilets through creating awareness and providing subsidies to poor people for construction of household toilets with service-level standards specified from experts’ perspective. In many cases, users are unsatisfied with the quality of toilets constructed using subsidies and the same remain unused. Users’ satisfaction depends on their perceptions of service quality of individual attributes and overall service quality of the household toilets, which is an important determinant of sustainability and sustained use of toilets. This study aims to assess and benchmark the appropriate service delivery level for quantitative attributes of rural household toilets based on user perception. The service quality is determined with the help of level of service (LOS) scales developed using successive interval scaling technique, the zone of tolerance (ZOT), and users satisfaction level (USL) which relates service delivery levels with user satisfaction directly. The study finds that the service quality of most of the attributes of household toilets constructed using subsidies is perceived as poor. The results also suggest that most of the users expect to have a toilet with the service level of attributes ranging between LOS A and LOS B. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the marketing implications of procedural and legal developments. The author presents several related court cases, including Philadelphia Housing Authority v. American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corp., in which the plaintiff alleged that the defendant had engaged in price fixing in regards to its plumbing fixtures. Other cases noted included Herb Wilson, Henry Schriner and Donald Lappin v. Ringsby Truck Lines Inc., and Clyde A. Perkins v. Standard Oil Co. of California CCH.

The hardware used for plumbing assemblies play an important role in modern home, business, and industrial systems. Engineered plumbing hardware made from metals allow for an extensive network of plumbing assemblies accommodating complex designs which facilitate product and installation effectiveness, in addition to maintaining cost efficiency. Examples of plumbing hardware include fittings, valves, drains, fixtures, pipes, and so on. These materials are often subjected to a range of environments dependent on local water chemistry as well as varying service environments and installation techniques. Given the vast number of components in use failures do occur, often as a result of extreme service conditions or inappropriate installation techniques. Understanding the failure mechanisms associated with plumbing hardware and their assemblies is an important step in material and design optimization for future development. In view of that, this paper provides a range of plumbing component failure case studies for potable and non-potable water systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tap water sampling and surface analysis of copper pipe/bathroom porcelain were performed to explore the fate of copper and silver during the first nine months of copper-silver ionization (CSI) applied to cold and hot water at a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ions dosed by CSI into the water at its point of entry to the hospital were inadvertently removed from hot water by a cation-exchange softener in one building (average removal of 72% copper and 51% silver). Copper at the tap was replenished from corrosion of the building’s copper pipes but was typically unable to reach 200 μg/L in first-draw and flushed hot and cold water samples. Cold water lines had >20 μg/L silver at most of the taps that were sampled, which further increased after flushing. However, silver plating onto copper pipe surfaces (in the cold water line but particularly in the hot water line) prevented reaching 20 μg/L silver in cold and/or hot water of some taps. Aesthetically displeasing purple/grey stains in bathroom porcelain were attributed to chlorargyrite [AgCl (s) ], an insoluble precipitate that formed when CSI-dosed Ag + ions combined with Cl − ions that were present in the incoming water. Overall, CSI aims to control Legionella bacteria in drinking water, but plumbing material interactions, aesthetics and other implications also deserve consideration to holistically evaluate in-building drinking water disinfection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an eye-in-hand vision-based robotic bin-picking system is proposed. The system can identify the pose of a plumbing part from a pile and grip it correctly. A monocular eye-in-hand camera and a laser projector are employed to reconstruct the 3-D point cloud of plumbing parts stacked together. The projection direction of the laser line projector is controlled to change in order to scan the pile of objects while the camera is observing. 3-D points can then be determined by the a priori known geometry between the camera and the laser line projector. To estimate the pose of an object, the iterative closest point (ICP) is employed to match the point clouds of the object and the model. The transformation between the object and the model can thus be determined. A computed closer point (CCP) approach is proposed to estimate the pose of an object since the deviation from the object to the model is initially large in nature. The proposed CCP approach combining with the ICP algorithm can improve the success rate and accuracy of point cloud matching. The proposed system has been validated by experiments with potential applications in production lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sheet intrusions represent important magma conduits and reservoirs in subvolcanic systems. Constraining the emplacement mechanisms of such intrusions is crucial to understanding the physiochemical evolution of magma, volcano deformation patterns, and the location of future eruption sites. However, magma plumbing systems of active volcanoes cannot be directly accessed and we therefore rely on the analysis of ancient systems to inform the interpretation of indirect geophysical and geochemical volcano monitoring techniques. Numerous studies have demonstrated that anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) is a powerful tool for constraining magma flow patterns within such ancient solidified sheet intrusions. We conducted a high-resolution AMS study of seven inclined sheets exposed along the Ardnamurchan peninsula in northwest Scotland, and examined how magma flow in sheet intrusions may vary along and perpendicular to the magma flow axis. The sheets form part of the Ardnamurchan Central Complex, which represents the deeply eroded roots of an ~58-m.y.-old volcano. Our results suggest that the inclined sheets were emplaced via either updip magma flow or along-strike lateral magma transport. It is important that observed variations in magnetic fabric orientation, particularly magnetic foliations, within individual intrusions suggest that some sheets were internally compartmentalized, i.e., different along-strike portions of the inclined sheets exhibit subtle differences in their magma flow dynamics. This may have implications for the flow regime and magma mixing within intrusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Length difference between plunger and winding is one of the most important issues in Tubular Linear Reluctance Motor (TLRM) design. Determining appropriate plunger length can have effect on TLRM output parameters, i.e. plunger speed, magnetic force and efficiency. In this paper, dynamic models of TLRM in two different conditions, i.e. equal and unequal length, using electrical and mechanical equations are proposed. Afterwards, the dynamic models of two conditions are simulated. The comparison of simulation results would determine the appropriate plunger length. Finally, in order to validate the modeling results, simulation and experimental results are compared. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]