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Post by GTCGreg on Jun 5, 2014 4:32:33 GMT
Unfortunately, I know the meaning of your post.
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Post by c64 on Jun 15, 2014 15:20:22 GMT
I'm trying to decide if an effective pump for pumping or sucking water out of a nearby creek can be accomplished by letting highly heated steam vent off a bit from a tank, then seal off the tank, letting the remaining steam cool in the closed-off tank, then opening an inlet valve, such that a supply line of water is already primed with water from a nearby creek. This way, the pressure difference created by the steam shrinking inside the cooling tank draws in water, and the tank fills until an equilibrium is made. (no air allowed to be sucked up from the creek or elsewhere) This is exactly the design of the very first commercial used steam engines! Many people belief that James Watt had invented the steam engine. This is not true at all! The first steam engine was the "Hero engine": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipilewhich was essentially useless. He also made the famous "Heron Fountain" based on his knowledge of pressure differences: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron%27s_fountainThe first commercial steam engine was a pump to pump water out of deep mines. This is exactly based on the idea of rmc, but a lot more advanced than this. It uses two vessels for a more continuous flow and it also uses an overpressure to roughly double the depth the pump could be used for, the pump itself sits in the middle of the depth. It was invented by Thomas Savery and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery and was known as "miner's friend". This one was then improved by another Thomas, Thomas Newcomen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_NewcomenThe actual pump part is now "classic" again and driven by a atmospheric piston steam engine. The athmospheric steam engine was improved by a water injection to speed it up. A counterweight moves the pump piston down and the steam piston up while steam is put into the steam cylinder. After a quick squirt of water into the cylinder, the steam condenses and the steam piston is pulled down, pulling the pump piston and the counterweight up. The problem back then was that they were unable to make pressure vessels which could resist direct fire. Anything pressurized tended to blow up eventually so nobody dared to use more than a few PSI in overpressure. In fact the Newcomen design eliminated the risk of a catastrophic pressure vessel failure the Savery pump was feared for. The Newcomen design was a lot more efficient and it couldn't blow up since it was based on negative pressure only. Also the actual pump piston could be on the bottom of a long pipe so there is no theoretical limit of the lift of the water any more. This is the very reason why modern oil field pumps still look like the Newcomen pump, just driven electrically. What James Watt did was to dare using overpressure. The idea wasn't new, the problem was that it was very dangerous so nobody really tried this design in a large scale. But since turning a crank with high speed using overpressure is so much more efficient and much more powerful with the same effort, people had accepted this new kind of steam engine quickly - once James Watt had proven how much superior this is. So if you like to copy "the grandfather of the modern steam engine", why not?
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Post by c64 on Jun 15, 2014 15:47:40 GMT
Someone had mentioned the "water ram". This one actually used to be very wildly used here in Germany, especially in the south where the hills are big. Actually it is based on the very same math as DC-DC converters and switching power supplies. The German Wikipedia article deals with the math, unfortunately the English version doesn't! de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulischer_WidderHere's a neat video of one in action. The technical data are: Length of the water line: 1200m Height differnce between water source and water ram ("Ram" [En] = "Widder" [Ge]): 46m Output of water source: 200l/min Water lift: 480m Water throughput of lift: 24,000l/day (6.6 l/min) The trick is to take the kinetic energy of 200 gallons dropping down by 46 meter and add a lot of this energy to 6.6 gallons to lift it by 480m. You don't need any special topology to do the trick, all you need to have is enough water to power the water ram, water you "waste" to power the pump. In fact, I have seen water rams which sit just a few feet lower than the surface of a lake powering impressive jets of water in the middle of this lake, some almost "spitting" 50ft high.
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Post by c64 on Jun 17, 2014 12:48:52 GMT
I have gathered some info about those "water rams".
The one in the video is a so called "compact ram" made by the Swiss company "Schlumpf" (www.schlumpf.ch). The concrete box houses a coiled hose which acts as the resonator and as a pressure surge damper. Usually, the feeder line is used as a resonator and it must tolerate the massive pressure surges. The compact ram depends only on the pressure of the feeder pipe and does the resonance all by itself. This has two major advantages, first of all there are no pressure surges in the feeder line so it won't break by the ram action and you can connect several rams to the same feeder line because they create their own resonance and won't interfere with each other. Also the dimension of the feeder line is irrelevant so it can be real short and in any angle you like. So the compact ram can sit right beneath the surface of a lake and very close to it and will work well.
The common Schlumpf rams are good for increasing the pressure by 2…15. So for every foot in height difference between your water source and the ram, you can pump water up to 15 feet higher. They also offer special rams which can operate in the 30x range but they are very slow and need a lot of water pumping very little.
They even have a warning on their website. The water the ram puts through must be able to run off all by itself so you shouldn't put a ram into your cellar!
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