Golpe de Ariete

Berkeley, Friday, April 10, 2026 11:04 PM

Working with equations, physical laws, languages, and experiences is beautiful.

Particularly, when making sense to names of phenomena in different languages.

We talked about water hammer today, and I was asked for its name in Spanish. I recalled that it was golpe de A… but did not recall the full word. It has been a long time, designing water systems under pressure, although that was my first payed job as hydraulic engineer (still student) might be in 2010.

Well, likely I did not recalled the word, which even was covered in instructions, as firefighters, because we were to supposed to close the valves that fast, which would create that hammering effect, and make the pressurized pipe to exploit.

I see, that ariete, likely comes from Aries, which is a ram. Earlier this evening I download those pictures, but I arrived quite tired, so that I was aiming to post it tomorrow. But this thing works this way. It is a sort of quick post, otherwise things get more complicated. Or I would forget. Or more precisely not forget, but get focused on other important things in the priority list.

The sequences of pictures below would explain the whole story. Sorry, I did not keep track of all the sources, because I was navigating in the web, but most of it might have been from wikipedia.

In French, water hammer, is coup de bélier. That would be a descriptive name a belier is ram or aries. But it is also a battering ram, which was used to open the city gates. See the second and third picture below. In modern times, still a smaller tool with the same name could be used to open house doors. See fourth picture. Well the name of that hammer, or battering ram in Spanish is ariete. It is the same in Italiano, which might have an older origin than the Spanish word.

Now I will remember as golpe de mocho, which is a kind of sheep. I am not fully sure of the Spanish word for ram, borrego is a bit different. But kicking hurts. I was kick on my testicles one by a dog, though, a German Shepherd which took the game too seriously. Hope, nothing major happened there.

Well, a ram, could break a pipe. Well, an ariete could. And it could break a quite strong pipe, particularly at its joints.

Actually, an unexperienced or unattentive operator without the knowledge, who would close to fast a valve, would break the pipe, or would make the water to break the pipe.

I think that the current English name is the best, because it is the most descriptive: water hammer.