The design process went through many stages and we had a few designs that were used and we built upon each one. The initial design was a concrete block in the middle and four plates to tighten down to achieve the pressure on the pipe as seen in figure 1.

There were quite a few problems with this concept. One of the main problems was whether or not the bolts could be torqued down enough to get the required amount of pressure needed on the pipe. Another problem was the degree of difficulty of getting the concrete to be an exact fit around the pipe. With these two problems we ended up at design number two (figure 2) With this concept we made different sections so it would be easier to move the pipe in and out of the incompressible medium.

After concept two we decided that we needed to make big changes because we did not feel that the bolts were adequate enough to all for the pressures that were requested by our sponsor. Along with this reassement we aslo did an analysis on the optimum number of sections that would create the most quasi-hydrostatic pressure on the pipe. The final condept was to be designed with six sections, and the pressure is now going to be applied with hydraulic presses.

Figure 3 Shows the final design concept.