Low Tech Keeps It Simple

I told people about my no tech pulser pump over 20 years ago (it is just a small tromp used to power a low head airlift pump) just pipes joined together. I didn't even know what a tromp was when I made it. I made a small one because all I had was a small stream to power it. People ask me all the time for figures to be applied to their (usually much larger) sites and unfortunately I have nothing for them except guesses.

At first, I got called a liar for even saying it worked!

So I put on a video of it working. Now the video "WORLDS SIMPLEST WATER PUMP!! Make a PULSER PUMP!" is the most popular airlift pump related video on the internet (even though it is crappy resolution etc) and people have made other videos of THEIR! working demos, in Europe, North America and Asia. Even so, that still isn't enough to make any development group or university or rich good guy anywhere in the world, do a simple (but large) test to see what a bigger one can achieve. I thought by now, someone would have made a larger one just out of curiosity. Some people say the reason it hasn't been tested is that it is inefficient. But they get mad when I ask how they know the efficiency is bad if it hasn't been tested?

I think there is a huge bias against low tech. If it is cheap, easy to maintain, and just works and works, people are just itching to replace it with something 10 times the price and twice as efficient that will break down and be irreparable in a third of the time.

You should be proud of your contributions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOn7Zu3CCxo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulser_Pump

Hi Gaiatechnician, The good thing about having the thing work right in front of you is they can call you a liar all they want, you know it works!

I read the explanation in Wikipedia and while I have no doubt as t that it works, I have doubts as to the why. The wiki article states pressure differences between the air charging and the water charging circles as the cause for the pump to work. Just from looking at it it seems to me that the reason water rises higher than to the level of the water reservoir is that due to the air mixture in the push tube, the compound density is lower there and thus the column of air water mix rises to a level where it's weight excerts the same pressure as the water of the lower water reservoir excerts on the pumping chamber.

I do not see a fluctuation in the pressure to be a main contributor, then again, I could be wrong, after all I am just playing mind games here. Any thoughts?

Hi, I missed this by being one of the ranters in other conversations. Basically, the wikipedia stuff is done by other people, i am not allowed to give my opinions there or

to try to edit it because I have a vested personal interest in the thing.

(Whoever wrote it sure doesn't like me!) I am pretty sure that Charles Taylor didn't invent anything . The wikipedia entry "Tuyau" suggests that the Romans were using trompes (supposedly invented in Italy in about 1500) and a guy in the US suggests that Joseph Priestley was using a trompe to power an airlift pump way back when he was alive. Interestingly, he died only a few years after the airlift pump was "invented". So, maybe Priestley (who discovered Oxygen and made the first soda water) could also be the inventor of both the airlift pump and pulser pump! Or maybe someone he knew invented them. I think people would respect the pump a whole lot more if Priestley is the rightful inventor. Anybody like to check? He lived in Pennsylvania for the last years of his life. So if he invented them, that would be the first place to look!

I think your explanation of airlift is basically correct. In a normal airlift pump, most of the water being airlifted is like champagne with little bubbles in the water column. In the pulser pump case, the water has "nowhere to go" to get round individual bubbles going up the pipe (because the tubes are narrow and so the water cannot easily flow back down the tube. That is called plug flow and it means that much more air can be entrained than in the "champagne" type airlift pump. This also means that it can work with less submergence. Brian

Excellent!!!

Efficiency is moot if the energy to compress the drive air for the pump is free.

The air lift pump is not novel. What is novel is the combination of a free to run air compressor and the pump.

What determines the compressed air pressure and its delivery volume rate?

Air pressure is a function of head. Delivery volume will be a function of the reservoir size, pressure, and pipe sizes.

This old article from Mother Earth News is a pretty good one.

Immediately any such idea runs into the question: what profit is there in providing clean water to poor people? The established players in this market have committed to an approach involving purchasing an expensive and complicated array of equipment and a commitment to purchase expensive replacement chemicals and/or membranes forever. Poor people can't afford chemicals and membranes and high-pressure, high tech solutions, so who will pay for them? Charities, of course.

Simple and effective solutions would jeopardize the profits of these corporate giants, and new businesses trying to grow in their shade will have a hard time. Corporations, despite their public posturing, are not interested in developing anything cheap for gratuitous public benefit because corporations are not motivated by the decent, altruistic tendencies of most humans but by a relentless need to make quarterly numbers to boost Earning Per Share (EPS). That's what gets you promoted and rewarded, not providing clean water to poor people.

Even if they had an interest, corporate development of new water and waste treatment technology is difficult if not impossible because of the use of discounted cash flows to estimate net present value of a technology development effort. Conventional accounting "fundamentally underestimates the real returns of innovation." See this penetrating analysis (p. 12 et seq.) by Vinod Khosla: http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/Innovation_9_8_11.pdf

It's great that the Gates foundation is working on this problem. It will take that level of clout to make any real progress. Is anyone collecting and examining technology alternatives to chemical disinfection and membrane filtration? I've been looking.

The choice of technology is relatively unimportant as long as it works.

What is destroying us is our obsession with newness for its own sake.

And that is being driven by corporate marketing, not by good sense.

I'm not even opposed to a strong corporate presence in society. But it has to be sane. Sometimes "old" or "simple" is a saner, more workable choice. If for some reason that choice is taken off the table for irrational reasons relating to power and profit, then our search for a "new" way will end in destruction.

We do need innovation because we haven't figured everything out yet. But one thing we haven't yet figured out is sustainable happiness. And if our social, political, economic, medical and technological "advances" don't lead us in that direction, then maybe they aren't really the advances they are advertised to be.

"What is destroying us is our obsession with newness for its own sake." Okay.

"And that is being driven by corporate marketing, not by good sense." I'm with you.

"...sustainable happiness..." If nothing else, a good buzzphrase.

Why do we need social, political, economic, medical and technological advances to lead us to "...sustainable happiness..."?

I was going to copy over a few bits from the Wikipedia article titled Happiness, but there are so many points of view that all of them should be reviewed and considered equally.

"... then our search for a "new" way will end in (our) destruction." Yikes! That's kind of fatalistic isn't it? The electric starter for automobiles turned out to be a good idea. ^{Well okay, not that great of an example but you get the idea}

Ket is my hero

what sort of economic is there that isn't dependent on growth?

My car has an electric starter?!!!

When did that happen?

A pulser pump is a tromp providing pressurised air and and an airlift pump using that air to pump water. It is a simple way to use water power because it has no moving parts and it is just pipes joined together. It differs from large commercial tromps and airlift pumps which are much higher pressure devices because it uses low pressure. The airlift process used is also different. Normal airlift pumps use the lower specific gravity of bubbly water in a deep well to produce a higher lighter column of water. Higher than the outlet of the pipe. The low pressure airlift pumps use "plug flow" instead. I thought it would be an attractive option but nobody ever researched how slow or fast or high it would go and ordinary people were afraid to take the risk and people hate the thought of digging a 3 or 4 meter deep hole beside a stream or river for an idea that has only been tested on a small scale.

A youtube friend suggested to check if a "pulser pump nano" was workable. This would eliminate the deep hole.

So basically make the tromp section of the pump as low pressure as possible. I don't have access to a stream anymore so I can only test the airlift component.

I used an aquarium bubble pump (produces less than 2 psi air pressure) to power a mini airlift pump with just 2 ft of submergence. so how high can it pump? My first experiment got it pumping to 13 ft high. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKtB1YKoMxk and someone else got it pumping to 16 ft high. This was entirely stable self starting pumping. You turn on the bubble pump and it just goes.

My next experiment improved the height to 18 ft. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_88_xUd5Zs However I used new tubing for this and flow back (which happens in all my other tubing) was far slower and it sometimes stopped. I cannot be sure that it would continue to work under normal conditions because I had to take down the structure very soon after putting it up, (high winds etc). I think there is some oily or greasy coating on new tubing and I wasn't smart enough to wash it with soapy water or leave it sit in dirty water for a few days before the experiment.

A failure of forethought, I guess.

I have it out there as a "world record attempt" for a bunch of reasons.

One to engage people.

And this really is an attempt to fill in a knowledge gap!

Doing the experiment does not have immediate value to anyone. But knowing the practical limits might be helpful to everyone from windowfarmers,

http://our.windowfarms.org/2012/01/21/jalapeno-at-1-year-and-doing-some-pruning/

to people in hydroponics, home water feature enthusiasts, to solar panel sales people. Another is because this "nano airlift pump" might be a viable way to pump water slowly from medium deep wells. Two 18 ft stages is 36 ft which is more than a suction based pump can do. Also, it might mean that a 2 stage airlift pump can be used in a shallower borehole than a typical airlift pump uses. First stage might be low submergence, low height, and this stage feeds the second stage that can use higher submergence and pump to greater height. I am thinking of airlift pump that is human powered or powered by a solar panel and bubble pump. I believe that if it works, such a device would be more compatible with water sources that fill slowly. A pump that can pump a well dry in 15 minutes is self defeating in the long term.

Anyway, long post! Sorry.

Like many of the most brilliant inventions, Airdrop was inspired by nature. It was inspired by a study of the Namibian beetle, an indigenous species that can be found in one of the driest places on earth. Living in an environment with only half an inch of rain per year, the beetle survives by consuming the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back.

Airdrop borrows from this concept, working on the hypothesis that water molecules can be extracted by lowering the temperature of the air to the point where condensation occurs.

Claudius Jaeger, wastewater consultants