JHOLLAND1
Titanium
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2005
- Location
- western washington state
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Inchindown Oil Tank
- Thread starter JHOLLAND1
- Start date
- Replies 4
- Views 893
Marty Feldman
Titanium
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2005
- Location
- Falmouth, Maine
The Inchindown tanks, in rural Scotland, were built at the start of WWII, as an oil storage facility for the Navy.
Not clear from this video are the purpose and design of the four manways, the method of containment of the oil to seal it off from inadvertant escape or leakage, or the piping system that was used to fill the tanks and then get the oil to the ships. This must be information readily available on wikipedia or similar, and on other YouTube vids. I don't have time to track down, but perhaps someone can fill in with more info.
Very interesting post. Thanks.
-Marty-
Not clear from this video are the purpose and design of the four manways, the method of containment of the oil to seal it off from inadvertant escape or leakage, or the piping system that was used to fill the tanks and then get the oil to the ships. This must be information readily available on wikipedia or similar, and on other YouTube vids. I don't have time to track down, but perhaps someone can fill in with more info.
Very interesting post. Thanks.
-Marty-
Marty Feldman
Titanium
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2005
- Location
- Falmouth, Maine
Makes good sense. It could then be the case that the tube diameter was designed to be big enough to get a man, or men, inside to inspect/clean/repair when that became necessary. Not duty I would volunteer for. But common enough for them to have fabricated the curved sleds for sliding navvies in and, hopefully, out again.
Thanks.
-Marty-
Clodbuster
Aluminum
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2012
- Location
- Tri-Cities, WA, USA
This is cool. A very similar design from the same era as what the US Navy used. I worked for a leak detection company that had the contracts for annual inspections of the Navy's fuel storage tanks in various places. These were a mix of above and below ground tanks, steel and concrete, from different eras. These are BIG tanks, the ones at Pearl are 250 ft high and 100 ft diameter.
I spent quite a bit of time in the facility in Manchester, WA, that services the Bremerton naval base. It was of WW2 construction, concrete tanks buried in steps up a hillside. 100 to 120 ft diameter tanks designed to hold bunker fuel, and currently used for diesel and various jet fuels. The tanks were on the order of 30-60 ft deep, if I recall, and were set up very ingeniously to work by gravity. They had photos from the WW2 construction of an open trench, no shoring whatsoever, to that depth, with pipefitters making up the connections to the bottom flanges. Looking down through the exposed cobble at men working. A different era.
The fuel is brought in by barges to a pier, and a beautiful 1940s pumphouse pushes it up pipelines through tunnels to each tank, which can be controlled remotely or manually. The piping is in tunnels like this video, so it can be inspected and repaired, and leak detection is very obvious. In case of attack or loss of power, the fuel can move back down to load barges or ships by gravity alone. Smaller craft load themselves pierside (the largest I saw was a destroyer), while barges are used to fuel the bigger ones in Bremerton, maybe due to draft issues or cost/time.
The pumphouse had a good deal of empty space in it with evidence of removed equipment. There was a small office in it that we were assigned with an unused coal bunker over it. In the days of thick bunker fuel, the coal fired boilers to raise steam, which was piped up the tunnels into the tanks to heat the fuel so it would flow. I can imagine the coordination that all took. Now they just turn a valve on a computer screen.
A very neat facility, and a fun job to work on. Our leak detection equipment was incredibly accurate. It's an interesting problem, to detect a leak in a large diameter tank. The only way to notice change is by recording head or pressure differences. But tiny changes result in huge volumes lost, and thermal effects dwarf all else when you are trying to detect.
The company I worked for had developed equipment that isolated a column of fuel in thermal equilibrium with the tank, and looked for differential pressure change between the isolated column and the tank. We would calibrate our equipment by dumping 5 gallons of fuel into the tank, which meant it could detect the increased pressure head of 7 thousands of an inch of fuel depth for a 120 ft diameter tank.
I also learned that our equipment could pick up the tidal effect - within the tank itself - of the moon's gravity. We would see a characteristic plot in our 3 day test levels that looked like a tidal swing. I thought on that for weeks, thinking there was a groundwater effect, tanks were moving thermally, but nothing added up, and they were averaging out to no leakage! And it only happened on some of the tanks we tested. It finally dawned on me that it was a tide of the fuel itself! I used naval observatory data to calculate the angles of pull between the moon and the tank over the course of the 3 day test, plotted the head change that would result from that, and compared it to what we were seeing... and it matched. I was proud of that discovery. And we learned that we could cancel the effect out by deploying the instrument in the middle of the tank, where the tidal swing averages to zero.
I spent quite a bit of time in the facility in Manchester, WA, that services the Bremerton naval base. It was of WW2 construction, concrete tanks buried in steps up a hillside. 100 to 120 ft diameter tanks designed to hold bunker fuel, and currently used for diesel and various jet fuels. The tanks were on the order of 30-60 ft deep, if I recall, and were set up very ingeniously to work by gravity. They had photos from the WW2 construction of an open trench, no shoring whatsoever, to that depth, with pipefitters making up the connections to the bottom flanges. Looking down through the exposed cobble at men working. A different era.
The fuel is brought in by barges to a pier, and a beautiful 1940s pumphouse pushes it up pipelines through tunnels to each tank, which can be controlled remotely or manually. The piping is in tunnels like this video, so it can be inspected and repaired, and leak detection is very obvious. In case of attack or loss of power, the fuel can move back down to load barges or ships by gravity alone. Smaller craft load themselves pierside (the largest I saw was a destroyer), while barges are used to fuel the bigger ones in Bremerton, maybe due to draft issues or cost/time.
The pumphouse had a good deal of empty space in it with evidence of removed equipment. There was a small office in it that we were assigned with an unused coal bunker over it. In the days of thick bunker fuel, the coal fired boilers to raise steam, which was piped up the tunnels into the tanks to heat the fuel so it would flow. I can imagine the coordination that all took. Now they just turn a valve on a computer screen.
A very neat facility, and a fun job to work on. Our leak detection equipment was incredibly accurate. It's an interesting problem, to detect a leak in a large diameter tank. The only way to notice change is by recording head or pressure differences. But tiny changes result in huge volumes lost, and thermal effects dwarf all else when you are trying to detect.
The company I worked for had developed equipment that isolated a column of fuel in thermal equilibrium with the tank, and looked for differential pressure change between the isolated column and the tank. We would calibrate our equipment by dumping 5 gallons of fuel into the tank, which meant it could detect the increased pressure head of 7 thousands of an inch of fuel depth for a 120 ft diameter tank.
I also learned that our equipment could pick up the tidal effect - within the tank itself - of the moon's gravity. We would see a characteristic plot in our 3 day test levels that looked like a tidal swing. I thought on that for weeks, thinking there was a groundwater effect, tanks were moving thermally, but nothing added up, and they were averaging out to no leakage! And it only happened on some of the tanks we tested. It finally dawned on me that it was a tide of the fuel itself! I used naval observatory data to calculate the angles of pull between the moon and the tank over the course of the 3 day test, plotted the head change that would result from that, and compared it to what we were seeing... and it matched. I was proud of that discovery. And we learned that we could cancel the effect out by deploying the instrument in the middle of the tank, where the tidal swing averages to zero.
