Brad,
That data is yet to come. There's still a few more articles left to cover radiators, blocks, fluids, you get the idea. After all of that there will be a wrap up explaining the stuff to think about when you put it all together and what to expect.
Bigben2k,
There's plenty of data on fittings available. Any engineering fluids text has them. Since those tend to be pricey, I often recommend an alternative source for the data. All you need to do is find a website that has the right tables. Most (industrial) pump manufacturers include engineering data in their catalogs and often online. Names along the likes of Goulds, Gorman-Rupp, etc., give you a pretty good idea of pressure drop vs line size and fitting types. These are all empirical numbers, but give us guys in the field a good start for estimating purposes.
In the world of small pumps, these charts lose some significance. The line lengths and absolute pressure changes are very small. In my experience and opinion, the only way to know your system flow is to perform the experiments yourself. This means measuring flow versus time with inlets and outlets at the proper locations to equate to the "real" system.
The guys have said it here, in a closed loop gravity has no real effect. Actually it has a large effect, but not on pressure drops. It's still responsible for keeping the fluid in a liquid state. Without gravity, all our fluids boil into vapor. Anyway, if you keep the inlet and outlet at the same heights they would be in the real system, then you can measure into a bucket what the flow really is. This is what Rich did for the data I used in the article.
Glad to see that most folks enjoyed the article. There's still a lot of ground to cover, but I'll get it all there eventually.
To all, I'm still open to any experience/data you'd like to share. Thanks for reading.
Dave
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