Fine, but what about the inertial effects on the water depending on the
velocity of the van or whether the van is going forward or in reverse?
Hurry up Friday!

At 10:50 PM 7/12/00 -0400, Karl F. Bloss wrote:
>> based on the original poster's assumption that the water pump has to work
>> relatively hard to pump coolant uphill, would it do less real work if
the van
>> were constantly driven downhill?
>
>Forget differential equations.  If it's a closed non-leaking system, it
doesn't
>matter how the van is facing, the waterpump is only overcoming the frictional
>losses in the system, not pumping up or down.  I.e. the more piping, the more
>friction, the more the pump has to work.
>
>Uphill and downhill don't matter because the starting and stopping point for
>the fluid is the same.  If the van is facing downhill, for every unit mass of
>coolant that's going downhill, another unit mass is going uphill and vice
versa
>if it's pointing uphill.
>
>-Karl
>
>Karl & Kristina Bloss, Trexlertown, PA - '87 Weekender "Bev" - 199K Miles
>http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw - vanagon@makarov.com
>VW Shop List: http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw/vwshops
>PA/NJ/DE/MD area VW bus "group" http://www.enter.net/~bloss/vw/pavanagon
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>