Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 3/9/25 3:00 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 9 Mar 2025 04:43:37 -0400, c186282 wrote:
 

    Still thinking about the low->high pressure "hydraulic transformer"
    ........ something like a big piston driving a small piston, maybe
    with mechanical leverage involved ....
    but CAN be done. The 'plumbing' analogy holds.

 We inadvertently built one of those when a check valve was installed
backwards. If you think about a double-acting cylinder the side that is
used to apply force is the full diameter of the cylinder. The other side
only needs enough area to retract the cylinder, so the rod fills most of
it with only a small annular area.
 Put the check valve in the retract circuit and try to move the ram by
pressuring the other side with, say, a 15:1 difference in the areas and
2000 psi and you develop 30,000 psi, enough to bulge a 12" cylinder. The
bulge wasn't visible but was enough so the piston wouldn't seal.
 Big chunk of scrap. Even worse it came from a British firm and they were
having one of their dock strikes so the replacement had to be air
freighted.
 On r/embedded a young intern was worried because he had smoked a sensor on
a $80 development board and wondered how much trouble he was in. I was
thinking "Kid, you haven't even started to screw up.".

   Heh heh ... yea, the Magic Smoke often fills the
   air during development  :-)
   A "step-down transformer" is dead easy to do with
   fluids - basically you just use pressure to turn
   a valve. High-pressure/low-volume releases low-
   pressure high volume ... 'DC' even.
   But a "step-UP" ... not sure of the best way to do
   that. "Big piston with a small end" will work, but
   to get continuous high pressure it still seems you'd
   need some kind of oscillating action to keep pumping
   that piston. Do-able, but less clean. However there
   may be a trick where you change the VELOCITY of the
   low-pressure stream and tap off the high-speed
   vortex. The Egyptians or Inca probably invented it
   already ......
   Oh geez, TV, they're still digging up Egypt looking
   for Cleopatra. She was an expert on drugs/toxins so
   my guess is that she didn't die of suicide, just
   adequately simulated death. Even easier to just poison
   a body-double servant, let the poison kinda mess-up
   the corpse.  Likely she went into Syria or something
   after the ruse with an assumed name and adequate box
   of coin. They'll find her somewhere near Damascus.