Many years ago during my relatively short career moonlighting as an oilfield diver, I was on a salvage job off the North West coast of Western Australia. While operating in shallow water, a 2,500 ton support vessel managed to strike an abandoned oil well. The well head pierced the hull of the ship and opened it up like a sardine … Read more

One of many on-the-drawing-board dilemmas for hydraulic system designers is whether to install a more expensive ball valve in the pump inlet line, a cheaper butterfly valve, or no valve at all.

At the root of this dilemma is the negative effect of turbulence in the pump intake line. The argument for using a ball valve as an intake line … Read more

A recent arrival on ‘Planet Brendan’ who works for Bosch Rexoth’s ‘Large Hydraulic Drives’ division in Sweden (a.k.a. Hagglunds division) wrote me this after reading my “6 Hydraulic Mistakes….” report:

“I would have liked more information on why you shouldn’t have filters on the drain line on piston pumps. We actually use that solution in our drive units and we … Read more