Okay, I have quite a few people disagreeing with me saying that the failure mode for PVC isn't water hammer, but no one presenting evidence. If you simply read the
wikipedia entry on water hammer, you'll see that is it common with air too. With water it isn't explosive as it is with air because water isn't compressible. Even the engineers studying
this airplane crash attributed it to water hammer.
And it is true that in a water-system you can introduce compressible trapped-air to prevent water hammer because you've introduced a 'spring' and suddenly you have a second-order differential equation-- that system won't be able to find 'reflection' to 'hammer' the end into a pressure spike.
And I've seen some other people saying that the barrel will "fail catastrophically" but it's not clear to me how even that can result in shrapnel from the back end of the PVC when the barrel-end of the system is OPEN. And again, I point out, I've done this and I've seen PVC fail using it for air pressure on a test system for train brakes. I didn't shrapnel, it just blew at a joint. I still maintain that the barrel won't introduce shrapnel, even in a catastrophic failure. It will blow a joint or split.
Also, when I blew up that accumulator tank that I was using, it was while quickly opening then CLOSING 1-inch dia piloted valves. I maintain you have to close a valve to get water hammer and with these systems, you never close a valve under high flow.
If I'm wrong...and I sometimes am...provide me with a logical explanation of why and how PVC--rated to usually 100+psi for water--fails with air.