this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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What is this thing?

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Sorry for the bad quality.

My grandfather had this in his office. He worked as a computer engineer so I initally thought it was a zoomed-in picture of a computer chip or something, but maybe it is something large.

He's not alive anymore so I can't ask him. If somebody can help me out, that would be great.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I believe this is the inside of an industrial, water-tube boiler. Like where it is being manufactured. If you look in the upper left, you can see tubes to be welded in. It isn't a perfect match, but those openings in the pipes look like where blowdown piping would go in. Source, I designed piping systems for these.

Edit: If you click on the small images on this page you can see a lot of piping that looks just like this: https://balcke-duerr.com/en/service-solutions/boiler-projects-services/

That said, it is really difficult to get a sense of scale here and this could be some much smaller heat transfer device that just uses the same design.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

This picture really has the same hex hole pattern.