[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have a fluid-filled system of pipes in your life, whether liquid or gas, (and who among us doesn’t?) there’s a very good chance that it passes through a simple device at some point on its journey to you. This device is almost unbelievably reliable for a purely mechanical system, and it has changed very little since the mid 1800s. So reliable that there’s a good chance you’ve probably never serviced or replaced one and maybe never even noticed one, despite them controlling so many aspects of our everyday lives. Of course, I’m talking about pressure regulators. But don’t let the jargon bore you, because these things are fascinating. They’re basically Victorian-era mechanical computers, and I cut one in half so we can see how it works. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering. “Control theory” is the branch of engineering that we use to describe managing dynamic systems, including the flow of fluids in pipes. I have a bunch of videos and demonstrations of just how dynamic those systems can get. A fundamental idea in this field is that, to garner any amount of control, you need some kind of feedback. And this is not a complicated idea. Say I want to control the pressure in my garden hose. I can put a pressure gauge on it, look at that gauge, and adjust the valve until I hit my setpoint. If something changes, like someone flushing all the toilets in the house simultaneously, I’m the feedback loop. I look at the gauge and make the change to get the pressure back to where it’s supposed to be. In fact, this exact situation (more or less) contributed to the pressure regulation equipment that we know and love today. The legend goes that in 1876, a massive fire broke out in Marshalltown, Iowa. William Fisher, a city engineer, spent all day and all night adjusting the throttle on steam-driven pumps by hand to manage the water pressure in the system to help the firefighters. Exhausted by the effort, he went on to develop the constant pressure pump governor, a precursor to the modern pressure regulators that are absolutely ubiquitous today. And I really mean that. Let’s take a little tour. One of the easiest regulators to find is on an air compressor. You generally want the reservoir as full as possible, which means pressurizing it to a level higher than what you would actually want out of the hose. Every air tool has its own maximum pressure, so you have a knob like this so that, no matter how much higher the pressure in the tank is, you get a consistent and controllable pressure out. If you use pressurized tanks of gas like oxygen, argon, or propane - exact same thing. You’re almost always going to see a regulator on top to control the pressure leaving the tank. Maybe you have a natural gas connection to your house. In most cases, residential plumbing and appliances are designed for very low pressures, like a half a psi or about 30 millibar. That’s great for getting gas from your basement up to your kitchen, but it’s hard to get gas to flow long distances at those pressures, so the lines feeding houses are usually at pressures quite a bit higher. You don’t want high pressure explosive gas in the walls of your house, so it has to be regulated down at the meter. That’s the pancake shaped device you often see outside. Even a standard pressure cooker has a regulator on top. A weight on top of a small pipe balances the steam pressure inside, providing only enough release to maintain a constant pressure inside. It’s not just gases either. The pressure in your water main can be too high for residential plumbing, so you might have a pressure reducing valve on your water service line. Most internal combustion vehicles have regulators that manage fuel pressure between the pump and injectors. And, of course, there are countless industrial applications of pressure regulators used in factories, power plants, and more. If you can find a pipe anywhere in the world, there’s a good chance that, no matter what’s in it, somewhere along it is a pressure regulating device. By the way, the stakes associated with pressure regulation are extremely high, particularly when it comes to natural gas. In 2018, the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts saw over a hundred structures damaged by fire and explosions, 22 people injured, and 1 dead all as part of a single incident. It all came down to a mistake made during a pipe replacement project that kept the regulators from working correctly. This was a system where pressure was regulated down at a district level instead of each individual meter. The mistake sent natural gas into homes and businesses at pressures way above what the plumbing was designed to handle, ultimately resulting in one of the worst natural gas disasters in American history. I covered the whole story in a video a while back if you want to learn more after this. Here’s the thing: it’s not that complicated to reduce the pressure in a stream of fluid. Basically any kind of obstruction to the flow will do it. A simple way to do it is to put a flat plate with a hole inside the pipe. But a graph will show you why it’s not quite that easy. Let’s assume you have a constant pressure on the inlet side. If you graph the outlet pressure as a function of flow rate through the pipe, you don’t get a flat line, but a curve. And, critically, when there’s no flow, the pressure on the outlet side is the same as the inlet. There’s no reduction at all. If you let the pressure on the inlet vary, things get even more complicated. It’s easy to see why a static device, like an orifice plate, is not a very good regulator. There’s no feedback and no control. You definitely get a lower pressure in some situations, but if you need a consistent pressure that doesn’t exceed some maximum level, this is not going to work. Early gas regulators were bulky contraptions, but actually pretty simple. You could suspend an iron bell in a tank of water. A cast iron cone was attached to the top of the bell, sliding inside the inlet pipe. If the pressure inside the bell rose, it would float upward, pulling the cone too. The higher the cone is, the more restriction you get on the inlet pipe, decreasing the flow to maintain a consistent pressure leaving the device. It’s a pretty clever invention, but not entirely practical. The water level had to be maintained; it could freeze or get gross; the metal corrodes. And importantly, when it failed, it didn’t fail safely. If the bell sprung a leak or the counterweight cable broke, the cone would fall downward, fully opening the inlet. Modern regulators have a few features that improve on the original idea, and I happen to have a natural gas regulator so we can take a look inside. This is a used regulator that probably came from a large commercial building or a light industrial setting. And it’s actually built by Fisher Controls, the company William Fisher started after his firefighting pump throttling experience. Not a sponsor, but I like to think he would appreciate us cutting it up to learn more about it. I tried to be strategic about this to allow a look inside without it completely falling apart. From the outside, it kind of looks like gas would make a straight shot through, but when you cut it open, you can see that there's a separation here where the regulator connects to the line. I have it set where the discharge is pointed down. Gas has to pass through this valve to make it to the discharge side, and you can see that, past the valve, the discharge side is connected to this chamber in the main body of the regulator. Inside the chamber is this flexible membrane called the diaphragm sandwiched between the two sides of the housing. It’s a little floppier than usual, since I cut the whole thing in half, but hopefully you can still see how this works. This regulator has a stiffening plate attached to the diaphragm that acts against a spring at the top. The spring is a little too stiff for me to show you the full range of motion, so I’m going to take the seat off just to demonstrate. Let’s say there’s no demand for gas downstream. In that case, the pressure in the discharge line will build up, pushing the diaphragm upward. The diaphragm is connected to this lever, which is connected to a poppet, which pushes up against an orifice to close the valve, preventing gas from flowing. Let’s say someone opens a valve downstream, like a stove or a heater. As the gas flows out of the system, the pressure in the discharge line will fall, reducing the pressure on the diaphragm. The spring at the top will push the diaphragm down, lowering the lever, and opening the poppet so that gas can start flowing. If the demand increases, the pressure will drop further, lowering the diaphragm and opening the valve even more. And this system will constantly adjust to the downstream pressure, throttling the valve to keep it consistent - a completely mechanical control loop maintaining equilibrium. Any difference in the setpoint and actual downstream pressure creates a proportional movement of the diaphragm and poppet valve. And it’s adjustable too: The compression of the spring at the top can be increased or decreased, which allows you to dial in the exact pressure the regulator will supply. This is just so impressive to me. It’s a dead simple idea, but it does such an important job. But one of the difficulties, especially with natural gas, is that, like all mechanical devices, there’s some friction in the system. I mentioned that the downstream pressure of natural gas is pretty low. This regulator has an outlet range of about 1.5 to 3 psi above ambient air pressure, or about 100 to 200 millibar. Force is pressure times area. If the area of the diaphragm was small, the total force from the gas pressure acting against the spring would be practically indistinguishable within that range, especially when you consider the friction of the lever and valve. That’s why the diaphragm in natural gas regulators is so big. Even small changes in pressure create large difference in force, so you get more sensitivity, and the valve positions are more closely tied to the actual changes in pressure. You might see an issue with this design though: For the valve to open wider to allow more flow, the diaphragm must move down. For the diaphragm to move down, the pressure holding it up (the downstream pressure) must drop. Engineers call this droop, which I love. But there is still some variability in the downstream pressure. Pressure is tied to the valve position, so it’s necessary that it be allowed to fluctuate some. It will never be rock solid in this model. If you need that, the solution is usually a pilot-operated regulator. In this design, the downstream pressure is connected to a tiny, ultra-sensitive pilot regulator, and that regulator basically uses the higher-pressure inlet gas to move the main valve. In this way, you can go from 0 percent to 100 percent flow with almost no change in downstream pressure. Regulators can also be sensitive to inlet pressure. You can see on my model that the inlet pressure acts against the spring to open the valve. Of course the valve is a lot smaller than the diaphragm, so the effect isn’t as big, but there’s still a relationship between inlet pressure and outlet pressure, which isn’t always ideal. A lot of regulators work the opposite way, where the inlet pressure acts to close the valve. If you use a regulator on a tank, this can cause the counterintuitive issue of discharge pressure spiking as the tank empties, since the inlet to the regulator isn’t pushing as hard to close the valve. If you want to reduce this sensitivity, you can use a two stage regulator where you drop the pressure in steps. Let the first stage handle the coarse reduction, providing a more consistent inlet pressure to the second stage which can then keep the discharge pressure rock steady. One thing this regulator doesn’t do is fail closed. If this diaphragm rips, the outlet pressure won’t be able to push it upward to close the valve. So we have to account for that potential in other ways. Lots of gas systems will use a secondary, redundant regulator set to a slightly higher pressure that will take over if the primary fails. There is also a circuit breaker equivalent for gas systems called an overpressure shut-off or slam-shut. This model uses another option: an internal relief valve. Say the pressure on the discharge end somehow got too high. Maybe something got stuck in the valve, keeping it from fully closing. Or maybe the discharge line was exposed to sunlight, expanding the gas inside. In this case, the diaphragm can bottom out and act against this secondary spring, lifting off this plate. Gas is allowed to escape through a hole in the center of the diaphragm into the top half of the casing and out of this vent hole. And here we have another valve called a flapper. It can open inward to balance the pressure inside the regulator. And it can open outward if the relief valve activates, letting the excess pressure escape. The regulator would normally be mounted like this so the vent points downward, keeping rain out. And it has a screen so bugs don’t make a home inside. Obviously, this has some tradeoffs. This regulator has to be mounted outside or be attached to a ventilation pipe running outdoors to make sure it’s not releasing gas into a closed space. Even so, you don’t necessarily want to vent a bunch of natural gas outside. But because of the odorant that’s added to it, the idea is that someone would notice pretty quickly that some part of the system is malfunctioning and shut the line down for repairs. Like every part of engineering, it’s a game of tradeoffs: pressure versus flow, capacity versus cost, accuracy versus redundancy, and safety here versus safety there. I just love that there’s stuff like this out there, pretty much anywhere you’re willing to look, doing an essential job that few people even consider, and that their basic function really hasn’t changed in centuries. Samuel Clegg, one of the early engineers in natural gas systems had this to say about the pressure regulator: “Its use is nowhere sufficiently appreciated. Had it been a complicated piece of machinery, or expensive in its first cost and after application, objections to its adoption would not have been surprising; but it is perfectly simple: its action is certain and unvarying, and its first cost inconsiderable.” Nearly 200 years later, I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] I love the periodic table of the elements. I love it because it reveals the deeper order of what seems like an otherwise wildly disparate collection of atoms with different physical forms, chemical properties, and nuclear stabilities. I love it because, even before we actually found the elements that fit into each box, we knew that something did and could even predict some things about those elements before they were ever discovered. And finally, I love it because it’s a bit messy. Not everything lines up perfectly, and in some ways, it’s still a work in progress. In many ways, human-created standards follow that same form, and I want to try and convince you that they deserve the same affection. Let me present the periodic table of standard North American electrical connections. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m fascinated by stuff like this: a diversity of needs and purposes put into a relatively nice, neat order. But why do we need so many? And where do any of these actually get used? Well, I’ve spent the past month reading just about everything I could find on electrical plugs and receptacles to figure those questions out, and I even have a few of them here so I can show you what I learned. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. Electricity is something we really don’t want to be proprietary. It’s one thing if your charger doesn’t work on your buddy’s cell phone. It’s another thing entirely when you have to rewire your house because you bought a different brand of toaster. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association, or NEMA, was founded in 1926 as a coalition of companies making electrical equipment. Their members realized that life would be better with some standards, so that any company making an electrical device could be reasonably confident that the people who might want to buy that device would be able to use it, and more importantly, use it safely. This didn’t happen overnight. It took a diverse group of manufacturers, engineers, and testing labs to form a consensus around the system we use today. And it’s far from a perfect system. My friends Mehdi and Alec have covered receptacle-related topics on their channels, including the merits and disadvantages of the NEMA designs. But it works pretty well. Well enough that the NEMA connector standards have been adopted not just in the US, but all of North America, Central America, parts of South America, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and beyond. Here’s that table again. You probably noticed that every type of plug and receptacle has its own special number. They seem a bit arcane at first glance, but it’s actually a handy naming scheme that’s pretty straightforward to understand. The first number is the configuration that defines the combination of voltage rating, wire count, and grounding style. These numbers are a bit arbitrary, but they kind of represent a certain class of receptacles and plugs. For example, NEMA 1 receptacles are rated for 125 volts and have just 2 poles (a hot and neutral) with no ground. The NEMA 1-15 was the classic North American outlet until the 1960s, and you still see these in older buildings. Lots of devices made today can still use them, especially low-voltage equipment like chargers, and, critically, those without external metal parts. If an energized wire inside the device comes loose and contacts the case, there’s still an insulating barrier protecting someone from being shocked. The reason NEMA 1 receptacles are mostly a thing of the past is what could happen when equipment didn’t have that protection. If a device with a metal enclosure or exposed metal parts had an energized wire come loose, that metal would be energized too. But, critically, it might not create a short circuit. With nowhere for current to flow, the device could just sit there, indefinitely dangerous, until someone happened to touch it, allowing current to flow through them to a lower potential. The ground wire we see in nearly all plugs and receptacles today fixes that specific hazard. Bonding exposed conductive elements and connecting them to ground makes sure that if they somehow become energized, current will flow, a short circuit will form, and protective devices like breakers will activate. Today we use the NEMA 5 standard for the vast majority of receptacles and plugs. Even if you’ve never heard of NEMA or seen the other plugs on the periodic table, you’re almost certainly familiar with this design. They have a 125 volt rating to handle the standard 120 volt service for most electrical devices with a little buffer. They have an energized pole, called the hot; a neutral pole to provide a return path, and a separate ground return that is bonded to the neutral line in the main electrical panel. The ground pin on most outlets is round instead of flat, and that’s the reason why nearly all electrical outlets kind of look like they’re screaming. Or at least they do to me. One thing about NEMA 5, and actually most of the NEMA configurations, is that the outlets have polarity. On the NEMA 5-15, the neutral slot is a bit wider than the hot, making it so the plug can only go in one way. In function, polarity often doesn’t matter for AC circuits. Current travels in both directions, so the equipment inside the device can’t really tell the difference. And some devices, like switch-mode power supplies, don’t care which direction they’re plugged in. Both blades are the same size. For safety, though, a lot of devices do. You really don’t want heating elements, motor coils, and circuit boards energized and waiting for a ground. It’s less hazardous to put the switch on the hot wire so that nothing beyond the cord is energized until it’s turned on. Enforcing polarity at the plug prevents “switched neutrals” along with other issues like electrical noise. The NEMA 5-15 plug and outlet were designed to be backward compatible with the older 1-15 standard. 1-15 plugs work just fine in the modern 5-15 outlets, and there are quite a few interesting compatibility cases like that in the NEMA standards. For example, the “15” in 5-15 refers to the current rating. Nearly every household device and appliance that runs on 120 volts is designed so that it never draws more than 15 amps, and actually, if the device is meant to run for more than 3 hours continuously, like a space heater, it can only draw 80% of that (which is 12 amps if you’re keeping score at home). That limit is obviously fine for most household appliances. But, especially in commercial spaces, it’s not quite enough power for certain devices like kitchen mixers, treadmills, copy machines, and power tools. Of course, we could just change the codes to require 20-amp circuits everywhere, but that has huge implications: larger circuit breakers, heavier-gauge wiring, and more expensive receptacles. And in many cases, it’s just not necessary. So instead, NEMA created a different receptacle and plug for 120-volt, 20-amp circuits, the 5-20. I have a bunch of these in the studio. You can see they have that T shape on the neutral slot. And 20-amp devices have the neutral blade rotated 90 degrees on the plug. But here’s the backward compatibility: regular 15-amp plugs fit into the 5-20 receptacle as well. NEMA 5 has 30 and 50 amp receptacles too, although they aren’t used very often these days because of a quirk about the historic availability of voltage. Today, split phase electrical service is basically standard for residential power. You get two 120-volt hot lines which can be used individually for smaller circuits or combined to get 240-volts for circuits that need more oomph. In the early 20th century, 240-volt service wasn’t always available, so you have these very-high-current 120-volt receptacles that could power heavy commercial cleaning equipment like floor burnishers and blowers, kitchen equipment like warming cabinets and steam tables, and large shop tools like table saws and compressors. Also, not all portable generators run at 240-volts, so older models used the larger NEMA 5 receptacles as well. These are still available and installed in places where, for whatever reason, a higher-voltage circuit is hard to come by. But in most cases, the more power-hungry devices are going to run on 240-volts. That brings us to NEMA 2. Like NEMA 1, these are ungrounded receptacles, but instead of a hot and neutral, they have two hots. Each is 180 degrees out of phase with its neighbor, so you get 240-volts across them, handled with a little cushion by the 250-volt rating. There were 20 and 30 amp receptacles, but, also like NEMA 1, these are mostly obsolete now that a ground is required by code. They’ve been replaced with NEMA 6, which has 15, 20, 30, and 50-amp receptacles and plugs. Of course, with double the voltage, you also get double the power compared to the NEMA 5 equivalents at the same current rating. The 6-15 is common for window or wall-mounted air conditioners. The 6-20 is used for heavier-duty air conditioners plus commercial kitchen equipment and shop tools. The 6-30 is used with large heaters, kilns, and heavy power tools. The 6-50 is kind of the standard welder outlet, plus it’s pretty common these days for level 2 EV chargers, capable of delivering nearly 10 kilowatts of continuous power through the receptacle. Like NEMA 5, the NEMA 6 has some backward compatibility, allowing 6-15 plugs to fit into 6-20 receptacles. This is kind of clever, but it doesn’t work all the way up the different current ratings. Of course a 50-amp outlet could easily handle a 15-amp device. And it would certainly be possible to design a series of outlets where each successive jump in current rating allowed those smaller devices to plug in. But there are two main reasons why they don’t: One is practicality. The blades on plugs aren’t all the same thickness. Designing a single receptacle slot that can safely grip both a thin, 15-amp blade and a massive 50-amp one would make manufacturing more difficult and increase the chances of developing loose connections inside the receptacle over time. Two is safety: circuit breakers are sized to protect everything downstream, including the plug and the appliance cord. If a thin cord on a low-current device develops an internal short, the resistance of that thin wire itself will cap the fault current so that a larger breaker might take much longer to trip or not trip at all. That could allow the wire to reach high enough temperatures to start a fire. Of course you don’t want a high-current device plugged into a lower-current-rated circuit, but if you trace out the things that can go wrong, it turns out that you also don’t want lower-current devices plugged into a high-capacity circuit. So, the plugs and outlets are designed to prevent both cases, except for the 15 and 20 amp situation, where the current is close enough that a breaker should still work as intended. 240 volts are useful to supply more power at the same current rating, but of course it comes at a cost. Higher voltage means more potential, literally, for arcs to occur. Equipment designed to handle the higher voltage needs better insulation and more careful design. Take a clothes dryer for example. You want the extra voltage for the power-hungry heating elements, but all the other stuff inside (like timers, controllers, and clocks) can easily run on 120 and those lower-voltage components are more affordable. That’s where NEMA 10 came in. You get three poles: two hots and a neutral. In that way, you get dual voltage: 240 between the hots and 120 between each hot and neutral. Of course, NEMA 10 receptacles also lack a ground connection, so they’re mostly obsolete. Plenty of houses still have them installed for clothes dryers and kitchen ranges, but since the 1990s, they’ve been supplanted with the NEMA 14 configuration. This is the most widely-used 240-volt standard in North America today. It’s versatile, providing both voltages. And there are a full range of current capacities, allowing you to design a circuit that’s well-suited for a device, from 15 all the way up to 60 amps. The 14-15 is pretty rare. I couldn’t even find someone making the receptacle. The 14-20 is also not that common. Some food service equipment uses this like certain coffee makers. The warmers rely on 240 volts while the fans and timers run on 120. Same with some jobsite heaters and specialized laboratory equipment. The 14-30 is the standard residential electric clothes dryer plug and is often used for EV chargers. Some server and mainframe equipment uses it as well. The 14-50 is the standard residential cooking range and oven plug. It’s also widely used for EV chargers and pretty common at RV campgrounds as well. The 14-60 is more of a commercial or industrial receptacle, used for large kitchen appliances and distribution of power at events like concerts. Single phase electrical service covers nearly all residential and lots of commercial buildings. But, the grid runs on three phases and it’s pretty common for larger commercial buildings and essentially all industrial facilities to have three-phase service. It’s particularly useful for devices that use large motors. And of course, if you have the service, you’re going to need receptacles and plugs for those devices, or at least the ones that aren’t hard-wired. NEMA 11 was the standard for up to 250V with receptacles and plugs ranging from 15 to 50 amps. Those have been replaced by the new NEMA 15, again because of grounding requirements. And this is going to almost always be relatively specialized industrial devices: woodshop and machining tools, laboratory testing equipment, grinders, pumps, dust collectors, heavy welders, plasma cutters, and so on. It’s not stuff most people see in everyday life, and in many cases, each receptacle is going to be custom-installed for a specific piece of equipment. And since hard-wiring equipment directly to the service panel is typically the default, that makes receptacles like these even more rare. You really only see them in places that need a high degree of modularity, allowing for rapid reconfiguration of workspaces like jobsites, certain manufacturing facilities, and short life-cycle equipment that needs to be easily swapped out. There are two main three-phase service classes used in most commercial and industrial buildings in the US. The most common is 208 volts phase to phase, which uses the NEMA 15 configuration. There’s also 480 volts phase to phase, but like I mentioned before, you can get a lower voltage between phase and neutral (in this case, 277 volts). So NEMA 7 has plugs and receptacles specifically for using just one phase from buildings wired with 480-volt, three-phase service. A lot of commercial and industrial lights use these receptacles, like warehouses, factories, and arenas, making them easy to swap out without hard-wiring. Commercial ventilation and air conditioning systems use them too. And just like the dual-voltage 240-volt plugs, there are also dual-voltage three-phase plugs, delivering equipment with all three hot phases plus a neutral so different components can run at different voltages. NEMA 18 has receptacles for 208-volt service, although they don’t have a ground, so they’re mostly obsolete. There are no straight-blade plugs that have replaced NEMA 18. Aligning and inserting a 5-blade plug would be tricky and take a lot of force. And I’ve kind of buried the lede here only talking about the straight-blade NEMA standards. The reality is that a large number of the NEMA receptacles and plugs have an equivalent locking version. These use curved blades that twist inside the receptacle so they can’t be easily pulled out. Actually the locking versions are more common than the straight-blade equivalents in many cases, especially when it comes to portable generators, jobsite equipment, and events where things are always moving around. If your vacuum cleaner unplugs itself because you’ve gone too far into the hallway, that’s usually not a big deal, but if a three-phase 600 volt plasma cutter does the same thing, you can get serious damage from arcing. That’s why the locking standards extend beyond the voltage ratings of the straight-blade ones up to three-phase 600-volt circuits. They even have receptacles for 400-hertz power used in aerospace, submarine, and military systems. Of course, sometimes the standards make themselves. When it comes to RVs and travel trailers, (from what I can gather) the industry had already developed a 120-volt, 30-amp receptacle before NEMA formalized its catalogue of standards. Instead of forcing an entire industry to retool, NEMA just adopted what everyone was already using, calling it the TT-30. TT for travel trailer and 30 for the current capacity. In function, it’s not any different than the NEMA 5-30 receptacle and plug, but you’ll almost never see one of those, because the TT-30 is far more common. It’s a face only an outlet enthusiast could love. I haven’t really talked about the smaller versions of the locking connectors used where space is an issue. And there are even more specialized standards like ship-to-shore power, aircraft, and military uses. Of course, when you look beyond NEMA, there are way more standards out there. But I feel like this is enough to get you excited about the weird, wide world of electrical receptacle standardization. There are all kinds of practical considerations that make it much more complicated than just a 2D chart with voltage on one side and current on the other. Just like the periodic table of the elements, the NEMA connection standards are a bit messy. And that’s what I love about them.

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] There’s a new trend in high-rise building design. Maybe you’ve seen this in your city. The best lots are all taken, so developers are stretching the limits to make use of space that isn’t always ideal for skyscrapers. They’re not necessarily taller than buildings of the past, but they are a lot more slender. “Pencil tower” is the term generally used to describe buildings that have a slenderness ratio of more than around 10 to 1, height to width. A lot of popular discussion around skyscrapers is about how tall we can build them. Eventually, you can get so tall that there are no materials strong enough to support the weight. But, pencil towers are the perfect case study in why strength isn’t the only design criterion used in structural engineering. Of course, we don’t want our buildings to fall down, but there’s other stuff we don’t want them to do, too, including flex and sway in the wind. In engineering, this concept is called the serviceability limit state, and it’s an entirely separate consideration from strength. Even if moderate loads don’t cause a structure to fail, the movement they cause can lead to windows breaking, tiles cracking, accelerated fatigue of the structure, and, of course, people on the top floors losing their lunch from disorientation and discomfort. So, limiting wind-induced motions is a major part of high-rise design and, in fact, can be such a driving factor in the engineering of the building that strength is a secondary consideration. Making a building stiffer is the obvious solution. But adding stiffness requires larger columns and beams, and those subtract valuable space within the building itself. Another option is to augment a building’s aerodynamic performance, reducing the loads that winds impose. But that too can compromise the expensive floorspace within. So many engineers are relying on another creative way to limit the vibrations of tall buildings. And of course, I built a model in the garage to show you how this works. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. One of the very first topics I ever covered on this channel was tuned mass dampers. These are mechanisms that use a large, solid mass to counteract motion in all kinds of structures, dissipating the energy through friction or hydraulics, like the shock absorbers in vehicles. Probably the most famous of these is in the Taipei 101 building. At the top of the tower is a massive steel pendulum, and instead of hiding it away in a mechanical floor, they opened it to visitors, even giving the damper its own mascot. But, mass dampers have a major limitation because of those mechanical parts. The complex springs, dampers, and bearings need regular maintenance, and they are custom-built. That gets pretty expensive. So, what if we could simplify the device? This is my garage-built high-rise. It’s not going to hold many conference room meetings, but it does do a good job swaying from side to side, just like an actual skyscraper. And I built a little tank to go on top here. The technical name for this tank is a tuned liquid column damper, and I can show you how it works. Let’s try it with no water first. Using my digitally calibrated finger, I push the tower over by a prescribed distance, and you can see this would not be a very fun ride. There is some natural damping, but the oscillation goes on for quite a while before the motion stops. Now, let’s put some water in the tank. With the power of movie magic, I can put these side by side so you can really get a sense of the difference. By the way, nearly all of the parts for this demonstration were provided by my friends at Send-Cut-Send. I don’t have a milling machine or laser cutter, so this is a really nice option for getting customized parts made from basically any material - aluminum, steel, acrylic - that are ready to assemble. Instead of complex mechanical devices, liquid column dampers dissipate energy through the movement of water. The liquid in the tank is both the mass and the damper. This works like a pendulum where the fluid oscillates between two columns. Normally, there’s an orifice between the two columns that creates the damping through friction loss as water flows from one side to the other. To make this demo a little simpler, I just put lids on the columns with small holes. I actually bought a fancy air valve to make this adjustable, but it didn’t allow quite enough airflow. So instead, I simplified with a piece of tape. Very technical. Energy transferred to the water through the building is dissipated by the friction of the air as it moves in and out of the columns. And you can even hear this as it happens. Any supplemental damping system starts with a design criterion. This varies around the world, but in the US, this is probability-based. We generally require that peak accelerations with a 1-in-10 chance of being exceeded in a given year be limited to 15-18 milli-gs in residential buildings and 20-25 milli-gs in offices. For reference, the lateral acceleration for highway curve design is usually capped at 100 milli-gs, so the design criteria for buildings is between a fourth and a sixth of that. I think that makes intuitive sense. You don’t want to feel like you’re navigating a highway curve while you sit at your desk at work. It’s helpful to think of these systems in a simplified way. This is the most basic representation: a spring, a damper, and mass on a cart. We know the mass of the building. We can estimate its stiffness. And the building itself has some intrinsic damping, but usually not much. If we add the damping system onto the cart, it’s basically just the same thing at a smaller scale, and the design process is really just choosing the mass and damping systems for the remaining pieces of this puzzle to achieve the design goal. The mass of liquid dampers is usually somewhere between half a percent to two percent of the building’s total weight. The damping is related to the water’s ability to dissipate energy. And the spring needs to be tuned to the building. All buildings vibrate at a natural frequency related to their height and stiffness. Think of it like a big tuning fork full of offices or condos. I can estimate my model’s natural frequency by timing the number of oscillations in a given time interval. It’s about 1.3 hertz or cycles per second. In an ideal tuned damper, the oscillation of the damping system matches that of the building. So tuning the frequency of the damper is an important piece of the puzzle. For a tuned liquid column damper, the tuning mostly comes from the length of the liquid flow path. A longer path results in a lower frequency. The compression of the air above the column in my demo affects this too, and some types of dampers actually take advantage of that phenomenon. I got the best tuning when the liquid level was about halfway up the columns. The orifice has less of an effect on frequency and is used mostly to balance the amount of damping versus the volume of liquid that flows through each cycle. In my model, with one of the holes completely closed off, you can see the water doesn’t move, and you get minimal damping. With the tape mostly covering the hole, you get the most frictional loss, but not all the fluid flows from one side to the other each cycle. When I covered about half of one hole, I got the full fluid flow and the best damping performance. The benefit of a tuned column damper is that it doesn’t take up a lot of space. And because the fluid movement is confined, they’re fairly predictable in behavior. So, these are used in quite a few skyscrapers, including the Random House Tower in Manhattan, One Wall Center in Vancouver (which actually has many walls), and Comcast Center in Philadelphia. But, tuned column liquid dampers have a few downsides. One is that they really only work for flexible structures, like my demo. Just like in a pendulum, the longer the flow path in a column damper, the lower the frequency of the oscillation. For stiffer buildings with higher natural frequencies, tuning requires a very short liquid column, which limits the mass and damping capability to a point where you don’t get much benefit. The other thing is that this is still kind of a complex device with intricate shapes and a custom orifice between the two columns. So, we can get even simpler. This is my model tuned sloshing damper, and it’s about as simple as a damper can get. I put a weight inside the empty tank to make a fair comparison, and we can put it side by side with water in the tank to see how it works. As you can see, sloshing dampers dissipate energy by… sloshing. Again, the water is both the mass and the damper. If you tune it just right, the sloshing happens perfectly out of phase of the motion of the building, reducing the magnitude of the movement and acceleration. And you can see why this might be a little cheaper to build - it’s basically just a swimming pool - four concrete walls, a floor, and some water. There’s just not that much to it. But the simplicity of construction hides the complexity of design. Like a column damper, the frequency of a sloshing damper can be tuned, first by the length of the tank. Just like fretting a guitar string further down the neck makes the note lower, a tank works the same way. As the tank gets longer, its sloshing frequency goes down. That makes sense - it takes longer for the wave to get from one side to the other. But you can also adjust the depth. Waves move slower in shallower water and faster in deeper water. Watch what happens when I overfill the tank. The initial wave starts on the left as the building goes right. It reaches the right side just as the building starts moving left. That’s what we want; it’s counteracting the motion. But then it makes it back to the left before the building starts moving right. It’s actually kind of amplifying the motion, like pushing a kid on a swing. Pretty soon after that, the wave and the building start moving in phase, so there’s pretty much no damping at all. Compare it to the more properly tuned example where most of the wave motion is counteracting the building motion as it sways back and forth. You can see in my demo that a lot of the energy dissipation comes from the breaking waves as they crash against the sides of the tank. That is a pretty complicated phenomenon to predict, and it’s highly dependent on how big the waves are. And even with the level pretty well tuned to the frequency of the building, you can see there’s a lot of complexity in the motion with multiple modes of waves, and not all of them acting against the motion of the building. So, instead of relying on breaking waves, most sloshing dampers use flow obstructions like screens, columns, or baffles. I got a few different options cut out of acrylic so we can try this out. These baffles add drag, increasing the energy dissipation with the water, usually without changing the sloshing frequency. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the performance without a baffle and with one. You can see that the improvement is pretty dramatic. The motion is more controlled and the behavior is more linear, making this much simpler to predict during the design phase. It’s kind of the best of both worlds since you get damping from the sloshing and the drag of the water passing through the screen. Almost all the motion is stopped in this demo after only three oscillations. I was pretty impressed with this. Here’s all three of the baffle runs side by side. Actually, the one with the smallest holes worked the best in my demo, but deciding the configuration of these baffles is a big challenge in the engineering of these systems because you can’t really just test out a bunch of options at full scale. Devices like this are in service in quite a few high-rise buildings, including Princess Tower in Dubai, and the Museum Tower in Dallas. With no moving parts and very little maintenance except occasionally topping it off to keep the water at the correct level, you can see how it would be easy to choose a sloshing damper for a new high-rise project. But there are some disadvantages. One is volumetric efficiency. You can see that not all the water in the tank is mobilized, especially for smaller movements, which means not all the water is contributing to the damping. The other is non-linearity. The amount of damping changes depending on the magnitude of the movement since drag is related to velocity squared. And even the frequency of the damper isn’t constant; it can change with the wave amplitude as well because of the breaking waves. So you might get good performance at the design level, but not so much for slower winds. Dampers aren’t just used in buildings. Bridges also take advantage of these clever devices, especially on the decks of pedestrian bridges and the towers of long-span bridges. This also happens at a grand scale between the Earth and moon. Tidal bulges in the oceans created by the moon’s tug on Earth dissipate energy through friction and turbulence, which is a big part of why our planet’s rotation is slowing over time. Days used to be a lot shorter when the Earth was young, but we have a planet-scale liquid damper constantly dissipating our rotational energy. But whether it’s bridges or buildings, these dampers usually don’t work perfectly right at the start. Vibrations are complicated. They’re very hard to predict, even with modern tools like simulation software and scale physical models. So, all dampers have to go through a commissioning process. Usually this involves installing accelerometers once construction is nearing completion to measure the structure’s actual natural frequency. The tuning of tuned dampers doesn’t just happen during the design phase; you want some adjustability after construction to make sure they match the structure’s natural frequency exactly so you get the most damping possible. For liquid dampers, that means adjusting the levels in the tanks. And in many cases, buildings might use multiple dampers tuned to slightly different frequencies to improve the performance over a range of conditions. Even in these two basic categories, there is a huge amount of variability and a lot of ongoing research to minimize the tradeoffs these systems come with. The truth is that, relatively speaking, there aren’t that many of these systems in use around the world. Each one is highly customized, and even putting them into categories can get a little tricky. There are even actively controlled liquid dampers. My tuning for the column damper works best for a single magnitude of motion, but you can see that once the swaying gets smaller, the damper isn’t doing a lot to curb it. You can imagine if I constantly adjusted the size of the orifice, I could get better performance over a broader range of unwanted motion. You can do this electronically by having sensors feed into a control system that adjusts a valve position in real-time. Active systems and just the flexibility to tune a damper in general also help deal with changes over time. If a building’s use changes, if new skyscrapers nearby change the wind conditions, or if it gets retrofits that change its natural frequency, the damping system can easily accommodate those changes. In the end, a lot of engineering decisions come down to economics. In most cases, damping is less about safety and more about comfort, which is often harder to pin down. Engineers and building owners face a balancing act between the cost of supplemental damping and the value of the space those systems take up. Tuned mass dampers are kind of household names when it comes to damping. A few buildings like Shanghai Center and Taipei 101 have made them famous. They’re usually the most space-efficient (since steel and concrete are more dense than water). But they’re often more costly to install and maintain. Liquid dampers are the unsung heroes. They take up more space, but they’re simple and cost-effective, especially if the fire codes already require you to have a big tank of water at the top of your building anyway. Maybe someday, an architect will build one out of glass or acrylic, add some blue dye and mica powder, and put it on display as a public showcase. Until then, we’ll just have to know it’s there by feel.