Lesson 4 - Principles of Fluid Mechanics 2

The movement of fluids within a maltings or brewery is fundamental to its successful operation.

If we think about it, how else would we turn our solid raw materials into a finished product, be it malted barley or beer, without being able to introduce and remove fluids in a controlled way?

Whether we are supplying water or air to barley during malting, or moving wort from the brewhouse into fermentation, or even transferring beer through a filler into a bright beer tank, we need to move fluids in a controlled way. But, why does this process need to be so controlled?

Surely, we can just open a valve on a pipeline and wait until enough wort, for instance has flowed through? Or if that is not quick enough, we can just add a pump to speed things up a bit? Well, yes, in some situations you can do this. We can either get what we get or keep changing the pump until we get what we want.

But what happens if the brewery is new and only at the design stage? What do we do then? In such cases, we would need to estimate flow rates and pressures for proposed pipelines or ducting. This is what we will be exploring in this lesson.

In order to consider fluid dynamics, we will need first to consider two guiding principles:

• Conservation of mass

• Conservation of energy

Let us now look at these in turn.