[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Have you ever thought about windows? Like really considered the idea? If we hadn’t been exposed to them our entire lives, it might seem like kind of a bizarre concept. On the face of it, windows are about light. But it’s more esoteric than that, especially now that we can make our own light. We want to be inside, but not all the way inside. So we put holes in the wall. It’s a heck of a trade-off: you get light and a view of the outdoors, but it comes at a cost. Not just the cost of the glass itself, but also the structural changes they require and their effects on ventilation, sound, cooling, heating, safety, and security inside a building. As simple as they seem, windows are a technology of sorts. And like a lot of building science, we’ve slowly been making progress, readjusting those tradeoffs and giving us the benefits without so many of the costs. I love to pick a relatively innocuous part of the built environment and really take a close look. So, I’ve built a few demonstrations in the garage to show you how far the science of glazing has come. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. Glass is not a good substitute for an exterior wall, in many respects. If you take some wall away and replace it with a window, you’re not trading like-for-like. For one, you never accidentally throw a baseball through a brick wall. But it’s especially true when it comes to heat. And this is a pretty big deal because we collectively spend vast sums of money, resources, effort, and energy on maintaining a comfortable thermal climate inside our buildings. Almost all the time, in almost all the places, the temperature outside of a building is different from the temperature we want it to be inside. But the laws of physics (also all the time in all the places) are constantly working to equalize those temperatures. We usually categorize the flow of heat into three separate modes. Conduction is heat moving through solid objects, atoms or molecules that are tightly packed, transmitting energy to their neighbors directly by vibrating against each other. Convection is heat transfer via the movement of a fluid like air or water. Radiation is heat transfer through electromagnetic waves. Since it is literally light, radiation doesn’t need a medium. All three play a role in the walls of buildings. And of course, it works both ways: sometimes it’s too hot outside and you want to keep that heat out. Sometimes it’s too cold and you want to keep the heat in. Any movement of heat from inside to out or vice versa is a flow of power, just like we measure with electricity. If you have 500 watts of heat flowing out of your house, you essentially need a 500 watt heater inside to make up for the loss and maintain a steady temperature. And just like voltage is a difference in potential that drives electrical current, heat flow is driven by a difference in temperature. The bigger that difference, the greater the flow of heat through a given wall. Continuing the electrical metaphor, insulation is the generic term we use to describe materials that resist the transmission of heat from one side to the other. It makes sense that we put it in our walls. In the US, we use R-value as a measure of this resistance. This is kind of a cursed unit of measurement, so I’m going to gloss over the scientific definition. But, a typical exterior wall assembly will usually have an R value between 10 and 25, depending on climate and how new the building is. A simple pane of glass has an R value of about 1. Let me show that to you. I built this box of foam insulation in my garage. Inside, I have a 25 watt ceramic heat emitter. I can close this up and wait for the temperature inside to stabilize. When that happens, we can assume that the heat going into the box is the same as the heat flowing out. Okay, this has pretty much settled out, and you can see that the difference between the interior and exterior probes is about 43 degrees Fahrenheit, I think that’s around 24 celsius. This is R-5 foam, soif you do the math for a perfectly sealed box with these dimensions that should be right around 50 F, 28 C, um, so accounting for the imperfections in my setup, like this, uh, terrible tape seal, that’s actually pretty close. Um, so now I’m going to swap this lid out with a pane of glass, and we’ll set this going again. Okay, this has settled out. And you can see that the temperature inside the shop hasn’t really changed, but the temperature inside the box has gone down a lot compared to the foam lid. The difference is about 22 F, which I think is around 13 C. So, just replacing one side of the box with glass instead of foam, it takes a much smaller difference in temperature to move that same 25 watts out of the box. I’m sure you see the issue here. If we want windows in our buildings, it comes at a cost of thermal efficiency. For every square foot or square meter of exterior wall that we swap with single pane windows, heat will move through that space roughly 10 to 25 times faster. So, we rarely use single-pane glazing anymore. Almost all modern windows use two, and sometimes even three panes of glass with a sealed air gap between them. Sometimes this gap is filled with a heavy gas like argon or krypton that has lower conduction and convection. There are even vacuum insulated panels that have no air inside, eliminating convection entirely. It seems like a simple change, but it makes a pretty big difference. I happen to have a double-pane glass unit, so we can try the experiment again. Okay, this demo has settled out now, and you can see that the temperature difference is right at 30 F, 17 C. Remember with the foam lid it was about 43 degrees and with the single pane it was around 23 degrees. So this is basically right in the middle. It’s not as good as when there was no window, but it’s a lot better than the single pane of glass. This varies a lot with details of the frame and coatings. But very generally, modern double-pane windows can double to quadruple the insulative value of a single pane of glass, and that can make a huge difference in a building with a lot of them. This idea of a sealed air gap between panes comes with one problem. If you’ve ever brought a bag of chips on an airplane, you know what I’m talking about. If the glass manufacturer is at a low elevation and the window’s going to be installed somewhere much higher, you end up with an overpressure situation between the panes compared to the barometric pressure. That can cause them to bow out and even fracture. In some cases, manufacturers will actually dial in the pressure for the altitude of the final destination. Another option is to install a capillary tube that equalizes the pressure inside and out. These are very narrow diameter and long tubes meant to reduce the amount of moisture that diffuses between the panes, which would otherwise lead to condensation inside the unit. Insulating glass panels help reduce heat conduction and convection, but that’s not the only way heat gets into and out of a building. The whole point of a window is to let in light, and we already learned that heat can move as electromagnetic waves. Of course, if we block visible light through a window to avoid heat transfer, that kind of defeats the purpose. But radiation also happens at other wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. Specifically, for the temperatures we deal with on a day-to-day basis, most of the thermal radiation happens in infrared: wavelengths longer than visible light but shorter than microwaves. Even within that range, there are big differences in how the waves interact with matter. That’s particularly true for windows. Typical stuff at ambient temperatures like a sun-baked driveway or human body, emit thermal radiation mostly in the far-infrared spectrum. This is the stuff you can see on a normal infrared camera. And even though glass is designed to let visible light through, it is almost completely opaque to longwave infrared light. Try looking through a window with an infrared camera and you just see the window itself, not anything beyond. It’s cool to think that if our eyes worked a bit differently - if they were tuned to a slightly different part of the electromagnetic spectrum - a glass window would be entirely useless. And it seems like it would be a good thing for our thermal problem, preventing heat from transferring through. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Glass isn’t just opaque to far-IR; it’s also highly emissive. That means it mostly absorbs thermal radiation rather than reflecting it. So, the radiation doesn’t come directly through, but it does warm the glass, which can then just conduct through the pane and reradiate it where you don’t want it to go, whether inside or out. It’s basically radiation with extra steps. On the shorter wavelength part of the spectrum we call near IR, it’s a little different. The main source of near IR radiation is the sun, and like visible light, that radiation can pass directly through most glass. This is how greenhouses work. The shortwave radiation passes right through where it can warm the stuff inside. But the stuff inside radiates longwave IR, which can’t pass back out through the glass. So, windows are kind of a two-way half-door for far infrared (since they absorb and reradiate it in both directions) and a one-way door for near infrared, but we can do better than that, mostly through low-emissivity or low-e coatings. These coatings essentially convert a pane of glass into a mirror for IR. And you can see the difference really well with an IR camera. You still get some reflections with an uncoated pane, but the difference is obvious when you put a coated pane next to an uncoated one. But this gets a little tricky, especially when it comes to near IR. If you live in a cold climate and your main use of energy is heating, you’re happy to invite as much sunlight as you can get inside. You don’t want to reflect the near IR. The opposite is true in warm climates. Fortunately, manufacturers can tune the coatings according to the climate. You can reflect shortwave radiation if you’re worried most about cooling, or you can let it in to gather more heat inside. Window manufacturers also sometimes vary which face is coated. In warmer climates, you can coat the inside of the outer pane, called “surface 2,” reflecting the IR before it crosses the gap to keep it from warming the air between the panes. In cooler climates, you can put it on “surface 3” to reflect the long-waveshort-wave IR back into your house without it having to cross the air gap. Making windows more thermally efficient isn’t the only use for glass coatings. If you’re like me, there’s a good chance you have the Merlin app installed on your phone. I think it’s a bit of an inevitability that once you reach a certain age, you start getting interested in birds. Unfortunately, one of the largest human-caused sources of bird mortality is actually windows. At certain angles, windows work essentially like mirrors, reflecting the trees and sky, and birds (bless their hearts) can’t always tell the difference. It can happen the other way too. Sometimes a bird will see something inside a building or all the way through two windows that they want to fly toward, not recognizing that there’s solid glass in the way. For you and me, walking into a glass pane like a sliding door is embarrassing, but for a bird flying at much higher speeds with tiny, hollow bones, it is often fatal. McCormick Place Convention Center on the lakeshore in Chicago may be the most famous case study. In an average year, monitors would find around 1,000 dead birds around the building from collisions with the windows. In October 2023, nearly 1,000 birds died in a single night. The owner finally decided to address the problem head on, installing a pattern of dots on all the glass surrounding the building. The solution cut the number of bird strikes by 95 percent. Awareness about bird safe glass is continuing to grow, and so are the number of solutions. Many glass manufacturers have bird-safe products that work in a similar way. The goal is to break the illusion of glass being a mirror or imperceptible as a solid surface, so most of the fixes involve patterns or designs on the glass. I think it looks pretty cool, actually. And because many bird species can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, you can even get dots and patterns that are practically invisible to humans, but still perceptible to birds to keep them from crashing into windows. Some cities are already including requirements for bird safe glass into codes, particularly in major migration corridors and for buildings that use large, uninterrupted facades of glass. This is a really common design for tall buildings and skyscrapers. Ever since I was a kid, I have always been impressed with this kind of facade. From the outside, it looks like a sleek, continuous column of glass. And it’s pretty interesting how it’s actually done. These are called walls, specifically curtain walls. But they’re also not walls in the traditional sense, at least when it comes to bearing loads. We typically think of a building’s exterior walls as the primary load path - the way forces from the building are transferred to the foundation. With curtain walls, that’s not true, and that name kind of gives it away. In buildings with curtain walls, the load bearing happens through interior columns. The exterior walls just hang there. Not that this needs another analogy, but it’s pretty much like the building is wearing a coat. This has a lot of advantages. A curtain wall is relatively lightweight, reducing structural loads on a building. It’s also thin, maximizing space in a building where it comes at a premium. They’re also unitized: you get very large pieces assembled in a factory so they go up quickly on a construction site. And, of course, you get a lot of light into the building when the entire exterior wall is a window. But how do you hold the glass in place? The process of installing glass, called glazing, is not like installing most other materials. You can’t use traditional fasteners like nails or screws. Glass is brittle, and the sharp point forces would induce too much stress. If you look at the windows of your house, the glass panes are usually sandwiched inside a frame with softer material that both seals against the glass to keep out the weather and spreads out the holding forces across a larger area along the edges of the glass. That’s sometimes called captured glazing. It’s done on large buildings with expansive glass facades too, but it’s not the only way. When you really want the outside of a building to look like only glass with no mullions or framing elements protruding beyond the panes, you can use structural silicone glazing, where the sealant does some or all the work to hold the glass in place. In 4-sided structural glazing, the glass panels are adhesively bonded on all four edges. You have nothing on the exterior except smooth glass. If you’re used to the silicone sealants sold at the hardware store, this might seem absolutely crazy to you. I definitely wouldn’t trust a tube of bathroom caulk to hold thousands of pounds of glass hundreds of feet in the air above sidewalks and roads full of people. To be fair, these systems do usually have some kind of mechanical clips or toggles that surreptitiously prevent panes from coming entirely loose if the sealant fails, but also, structural silicone is very different from caulk. Just to demonstrate this, I have a glass block. First I’m going to attach this to a metal plate using typical silicone caulk you might use in the bathroom. I’m starting with a 45-pound weight on the hook, which is probably a bit ambitious. And of course, the camera died right when that dropped, but it held 45 lbs for just about a minute before it dropped. And part of that’s cause, even after 2 weeks of curing, you can see, only the caulk around the edges actually cured. This stuff is just not designed for heavy weights like this. Now I’ll try it with structural silicone. This stuff comes from a few manufacturers in a variety of strengths, curing systems, and material compatibilities. After I let this cure for a week, which is when the manufacturer says it reaches 50 percent of its strength, I tried my little demo again. Wow. It’s holding 45 pounds just fine. So I added this small metal anvil just for good measure, and it’s still holding fine. Just a silly little experiment like this can give you a lot more confidence that those big insulated glass units on tall buildings aren’t going anywhere. But the engineering of windows doesn’t stop at holding them in place. We also have to think about what happens if they break. The most typical glass we think about with picture frames and windows is actually annealed glass. The manufacturing process is pretty impressive. The molten material is allowed to spread out and float atop a bed of molten tin, making it extremely flat and very consistent in thickness. Then the glass is allowed to cool slowly, which relieves internal stresses. That makes it possible to cut along clean lines and even drill holes in the material. But it also means that when annealed glass breaks, it usually fractures into large, razor-sharp shards that can be extremely dangerous. I think most people have enough experience with the issue that there’s hardly a need at all to say that broken glass is a serious hazard. And in many cases, it’s a simply unacceptable hazard: a slip in the shower that breaks the door, a toddler on a glass tabletop, even pushing too hard on a glass door. There are plenty of documented cases where a simple accident became fatal simply because of how annealed glass becomes jagged and razor-sharp when it fractures. One of the main solutions to the problem is tempering the glass. If you heat glass and cool it down quickly, often using a high-pressure blast of air, you can get the outside to cool a little quicker than the inside of the glass. The outside faces shrink. Then when the inside cools, it shrinks as well, pulling the outside faces of the glass into compression. If you use a polarizing filter, sometimes you can even see the stresses in tempered glass. This is a tricky process because if the cooling happens unevenly, the glass will crack or break. I’ve discovered this myself by accidentally setting a glass dish on the stove burner. But if you do it right, tempering glass makes it much stronger than typical annealed glass. Since the outer faces are in compression, cracks are less able to propagate. But even if it does break, tempered glass has a big advantage. Instead of the large shards, you tiny, relatively harmless pieces. These can still have sharp edges, but just being so much smaller means they’re much less able to injure someone. They have a lot less mass when they fall, and the edges are shorter, so it’s more like angry gravel and less like deadly knives and spears. That’s why tempered glass is often called safety glass, and lots of building codes require it in situations where broken glass can pose a safety hazard like glass doors, large windows close to the ground, and in bathrooms and showers. Most vehicles also use tempered glass on the side windows to reduce the risk of injury during a crash. One disadvantage of tempered glass is that it can’t be modified after the fact. All that built-up stress in the material makes sure it shatters into tiny pieces, but it also prevents you from cutting or drilling holes. Tempering has to be the final step. The other disadvantage also comes from its main advantage. Because tempered glass breaks in a relatively safe way, it doesn’t offer much security. And really it’s true for annealed glass too. Windows aren’t just a thermal weak point in buildings; they are also a security weak point. Why would a criminal struggle to break through a reinforced door if they can just quickly smash a window? That’s where laminated glass comes in. You can glue individual panes of glass together where they still retain almost perfect optical clarity. But even better than that, you can sandwich a tough plastic interlayer between those panes of glass, creating a composite material. And it behaves a lot differently when it breaks. Now you don’t have shards separating at all. Even completely cracked apart, the glass stays adhered to the plastic instead of flying apart. And more importantly, this is still a barrier even after it breaks. I’m not getting my hand through there. Laminated glass is ideal for overhead applications, where a break could otherwise rain down shards on people below. And it’s perfect for commercial buildings, especially on ground floors, to make it more challenging for someone to break in through a window or glass door. Laminated glass is also standard on vehicle windshields to offer more protection from a road hazard that could otherwise break through the glass and injure the driver or passengers. What’s kind of crazy is that I’m just scratching the surface of modern window technology, not to mention the glass itself, which can get a lot more complicated for applications like phone screens. But these are all innovations that are kind of hiding in plain sight, and to me at least, they make the view through a window just a little bit sweeter.

[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.] Flaming Gorge Dam rises from the Green River in northern Utah like a concrete wedge driven into the canyon, anchored against the sheer rock walls that flank it. It’s quintessential, in a way. It’s what we picture when we think about dams: a hulking, but also somehow graceful, wall of concrete stretching across a narrow rocky valley. But to dam engineers, there’s nothing quintessential about it. So-called arch dams are actually pretty rare. For reference, the US has about 92,000 dams listed in the national inventory. I couldn’t find an exact number, but based on a little bit of research, I estimate that we have maybe around 50 arch dams - it’s less than a tenth of a percent. The only reason we think of arch dams as archetypal is because they’re so huge. I counted 11 in the US that have their own visitor center. There just aren’t that many works of infrastructure that double as tourist destinations, and the reason for it is, I think, kind of interesting. Because an arch dam isn’t just an engineering solution to holding back water, and it’s not just a solution to holding back a lot of water. It’s all about height, and I built a little demo to show you what I mean. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. Engineers love categories, and dams are no exception. You can group them in a lot of ways, but mostly, we care about how they handle the incredible force of water they hold back. Embankment dams do it with earth or rock, relying on friction between the individual particles that make up the structure. Gravity dams do it with weight. Let me show you an example. I have my tried and trusted acrylic flume with a small plastic dam. Once this is all set up, I can start filling up the reservoir. This little dam is a little narrower than the flume. It doesn’t touch the sides, so it leaks a bit. The reason for that will be clear in a moment. And hopefully you can see what’s about to happen. This gravity dam doesn’t have much gravity in it, so it doesn’t take much water at all before you get a failure. I’m counting failure as the first sign of movement, by the way. That’s when the stabilizing forces are overcome by the destabilizing ones. And the little dam by itself could hold until my reservoir was about a quarter of the way to the top. Gravity dams get their stability against sliding from… you guessed it… friction. Bet you thought I was going to say gravity. And actually, it kind of is gravity, since frictional resistance is a function of just two variables: the normal force (in other words, the weight of the structure) and a coefficient that depends on the two materials touching. Engineers analyze the stability of gravity dams in cross-section, essentially taking a small slice of the structure. You want every slice to be able to support itself. That’s why I didn’t want the demo touching the sides of the flume; it would add resistance that doesn’t actually exist in a cross-section. The destabilizing force is hydrostatic pressure from the reservoir, which increases with depth. And the stabilizing force is friction. There are some complexities to this that we’ll get into, but very generally, as long as you have more friction than pressure, you’re good; you have a stable structure. So let’s add some normal force to the demo and see what happens. [Beat] You can see my little reservoir gets a little higher before the dam fails, about halfway to the top. And we can try it again with more weight. But the result gets a little more interesting… the dam didn’t actually slide this time, but it still failed. Turns out gravity dams have two major failure modes: sliding and overturning. Resistance to sliding comes from friction, which really doesn’t depend on how the weight of the dam is distributed. That’s not true for overturning failures. Let’s look back at our cross-section. For a unit width of dam, the hydrostatic pressure from the reservoir looks like this. Pressure increases with depth. And the area under this line is the total force pushing the dam downstream. We can simplify that distribution and treat it like it’s a single force, and it turns out when you do that, the force acts a third of the way up the total depth of water. Most dams want to rotate about the downstream toe, so you have a destabilizing force offset from the point of rotation. In other words, you have a torque, also called a moment. The dam has to create an opposite moment around that point to remain stable. Moment or torque is calculated as the force multiplied by its perpendicular distance from the point of rotation. So, the further the center of mass is from the downstream toe, the more stable the structure is, and the demo shows it too. Here’s where we left the weights the last time, and let’s see it happen again. The reservoir makes it about two-thirds of the way up the walls before the dam overturns. Let’s make a simple shift. Just move the weights further upstream and try again. It’s not a big difference. The reservoir reaches about three-quarters the way up before we see a sliding failure, but shifting the weights did increase the stability. And this is why a lot of gravity dams have a fairly consistent shape, with most of the weight concentrated on the upstream side, and usually a sloped or stepped downstream face. Interestingly, you can use the force of water against itself in a way. Watch what happens when I turn my little model around. Now the hydrostatic pressure applies both a destabilizing and stabilizing force, so you get more resistance for a given depth. A lot of deployable temporary storm barriers and cofferdam systems take advantage of this kind of configuration. You can imagine if I extended the base even further, I could create a structure that was self-stable just from its geometry alone. The weight of the water on the footing would overcome the lateral pressure. But there’s a catch to this. This is fully stable now, but watch what happens when I give the dam just a bit of a tilt. All of a sudden, it’s no longer stable. This might seem kind of intuitive, but I think it’s important to explain what’s actually going on. Hydrostatic pressure from the reservoir doesn’t only act on the face of a dam. With smooth plastic on smooth plastic, you get a pretty nice seal, but as soon as even a tiny gap opens, water gets underneath. Now there’s upward pressure on the bottom of the dam as well. If you’re depending on the downward force of a dam from its weight for stability, it’s easy to see why an upward force is a bad thing. And it’s so dramatic in the example with the upstream footing specifically. In that case, the downward pressure of the reservoir is acting as a stabilizing force, but if water can get underneath that footing, it basically cancels out. The pressure on the bottom is the same as the pressure on the top. But this isn’t only an issue in that case. The ground isn’t waterproof. In fact, I’ve done a video all about the topic. Soil and rock works more like a sponge than a solid material, and water can flow through them. That’s how we get aquifers and wells and springs and such. But it’s a problem for gravity dams, because water can seep below the structure and apply pressure to the bottom, essentially counteracting its weight. We call it uplift. Looking back at the cross-section, we can estimate this. Of course, you have the triangular pressure distribution along the upstream face. But at this point you have the full hydrostatic pressure also pushing upward. And at the downstream toe, you have no pressure (it’s exposed to the atmosphere). So, now you have a pressure distribution below the dam that looks like this. Of course, this part can get a lot more complicated since most dams don’t sit flush with the ground, and many are equipped with drains and cutoff walls, so definitely go check that other video out if you want to learn more. But let me show you the issue this causes with some recreational math on our cross-sectional slice of the dam. The taller the dam, the greater the uplift force. That happens linearly. In other words, the force is proportional to the depth of the reservoir. But look at the lateral force. Again, remember it’s the area under this triangle. Maybe you remember that formula: one-half times base times height. Well, the height is the depth of the water. And the base is also a function of the depth. More specifically, it’s the unit weight of water times depth. Multiply it together, and you see the challenge: the force increases as a function of the depth squared. So for every unit of additional height you want out of a gravity dam, you need significantly more weight to resist the forces, which means more material and thus a lot more cost. Hopefully all this exposition is starting to reveal a solution to this rapid divergence of stability and loads as a reservoir increases in height. Dams don’t actually float in space like my demonstration and graphics show. You know, by necessity, they extend across the entire valley and usually key into the abutments on either side. Naturally, that connection at the sides is going to offer some resistance to the forces dams need to withstand. And if you can count on that resistance, you can significantly lower the mass, and thus the cost, of the structure. But, again, this gets complicated. Let’s go back to the demo. Now I’m going to replace my gravity dam with something much simpler. Just a sheet of aluminum flashing, and, to simulate that resistance provided by socketing the structure into the earth, I’ve taped it to the bottom and sides… with some difficulty, actually. When I fill up the reservoir with water, it holds just fine. There’s a little leaking past my subpar tape job, but this is a fully stable structure. And I think the comparison here is pretty stark. When you can develop resistance from the sides you can get away with a lot less dam. But it’s harder than you might think to do that. For one, the natural soil or rock at a dam site might not be all that strong. The banks of rivers aren’t generally known for their stability, so the prospect of transferring enormous amounts of force into them rarely makes a lot of engineering sense. But the other challenge is in the dam itself. Take a look back at this demo. See how my dam is bending behind the force of the water. It’s holding there, but, you know, we don’t actually build dams out of aluminum flashing. Resisting loads in this way basically treats the dam like a beam, like a sideways bridge girder. Except, unlike girder bridges that usually only span up to a few hundred feet, dams are often much longer. Even the stiffest modern materials, like prestressed concrete boxes, would just deflect too much under load to transfer all the hydrostatic pressure across a valley into the abutments. Plus we usually don’t like to rely on steel too much in dams because of issues with corrosion and longevity. So where a typical beam experiences both tensile and compressive stress on opposite sides, we really need to transfer all that load, creating only compressive stress in the material. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. How have we been building bridges for ages from materials like masonry where tensile stress isn’t an option? It’s arches! The arch is a special shape in engineering because you can transfer loads by putting the material in compression only, allowing for simpler, cheaper, and longer-lasting materials like masonry and concrete. You basically co-opt the geology for support, reducing the need for a massive structure. For completeness’s sake, let me show you how it works in the demo. I’ve formed a little arch from my thin sheet of aluminum. Now when I fill up the reservoir, there’s no deflection like the previous example. And again, side by side, it’s easy to see the benefits here. You get a lot more efficiency out of your materials than you do with an earthen embankment dam or a gravity structure. Of course, there are some drawbacks here. For one, arches create horizontal forces at the supports called thrusts that have to be resisted. Sites that use this design really require strong, competent rock in the abutments to withstand the enormous loads. And just like with bridges, the span matters. The wider the valley, the bigger the arch needs to be, so these dams generally only make sense in deep gorges and steep, narrow canyons. The engineering is a lot more complicated, too. You can’t use a simple 2D cross-section to demonstrate stability. The structural behavior is inherently three-dimensional, which is tougher to characterize, especially when you consider unusual conditions like earthquakes and temperature effects. And since they’re lighter, arch dams don’t resist uplift forces very well, making foundation drainage systems more critical. All this means that it’s really only a solution that makes economic sense in a narrow range of circumstances, one of the most important being height. For smaller dams, the additional complexity and expense of designing and building an arch aren’t justified by the structural efficiency. Gravity and embankment dams are much more adaptable to a wider range of site conditions. And there are other types of dams, too, that blend these ideas. Multiple-arch dams use a series of smaller arches supported by buttresses, dividing the span into more manageable components. Even what is perhaps the most famous arch dam in the world - Hoover Dam - isn’t a pure arch structure. Technically, it’s a gravity-arch dam, meaning it resists part of the water load through mass while also distributing the forces into the canyon through arch action. The proportions are carefully balanced to take advantage of the unique site conditions and relatively wider canyon than most arch dams are built in. And so, when you look at the tallest dams on Earth, one structural form dominates. By my estimation, around 40 percent of the tallest 200 dams in the world incorporate an arch into their design. There aren’t that many places where it makes sense, but when you compare what it takes to hold a reservoir back in a narrow canyon valley, I think the case for arches is pretty clear.

[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.