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🔧 Water Hammer: Pressure Transients in Pipes

Discover how a sudden valve closure sends a pressure surge racing through a pipe, and how fluid velocity, pipe elasticity, and wave celerity set the peak pressure through the Joukowsky equation.

Engineering & Materials3DModerate60 FPS💧 Water

The simulation demonstrates how a sudden valve closure generates a pressure wave that propagates through a pipe, showing how fluid velocity and pipe elasticity together determine the peak surge pressure via the Joukowsky equation.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the fluid velocity and pipe elasticity sliders and trigger a valve closure to watch the pressure wave travel along the pipe, reflect at the far end, and observe the resulting peak pressure reading.

💡 Did You Know?

The Joukowsky equation is named after Nikolay Zhukovsky, who derived it in the 1890s while investigating a series of destructive pipe failures in the Moscow municipal water supply system.

⚙ Under the hood

Discover how a sudden valve closure sends a pressure surge racing through a pipe, and how fluid velocity, pipe elasticity, and wave celerity set the peak pressure through the Joukowsky equation.

water hammerpipe transientjoukowsky equationpressure surgewave celerityfluid transientspipeline engineeringhydraulics

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install