Comment by saalweachter
7 years ago
As a home owner this intrigues me.
If your house were a barn, there's nothing much to go wrong. Add some fire for heat, and now your house can burn down. Add some water for indoor plumbing and now your house can rot, flood, or simply be more attractive to termites (who need water plus wood). Add electricity for lighting and whatnot, and you now have a second way your house can burn down, or kill you in other ways.
Pneumatics are interesting because their failure modes don't involve destroying the structure they inhabit.
> Pneumatics are interesting because their failure modes don't involve destroying the structure they inhabit.
That depends on where they store the compressed air and how high the pressure goes. Sudden decompression can produce a very destructive shockwave.
That's just it -- you can store and compress the air outside the house and pump it in at low pressures.
We do the same thing for electricity, but the "low pressures" we pump it into our houses at can still burn them down or kill us outright.
On the one hand, you're right, pneumatics won't burn the house down. On the other hand, their failure mode is to explode like a bomb and send shrapnel flying through human beings. But at least the house is safe?
Eh, while there is a certain potential, the primary failure mode for pneumatics is just a simple rupture, where a pipe splits and all the air runs out.
Even that is easy enough to avoid by adding a few relief valves here and there that spring at the working pressure of the system, but that's not really a failure, and other house systems have comparable safety features, so not really a distinguishing feature of pneumatics vs electrics.
the primary failure mode for pneumatics is just a simple rupture, where a pipe splits and all the air runs out
...rapidly releasing all that stored energy in the process, i.e. an explosion.