Alright everyone, Cody here
So today, I'm trying to invent a water pump that has no moving parts that can wear out
This is kind of for my enclosed ecosystems that I've got you know to pump water around indefinitely
And I'd really like it to be solar-powered so this was my first
Prototype here, it's using a thermal siphon type effect
which I'm seeing if I can stack together and multiply the force that the thermo siphon can have
So I've got two glasses with water. Well. They're plastic
The water level is at the same height because water does that it seeks the gravitational
Gradient that is the same
And so what's gonna happen here is I'm gonna heat this side and cool this side
And I'm gonna see how much the water moves up on this side
If it does it all and hopefully more than what you would expect just from a little column of warm water
Well that was underwhelming, but it did work.
you can see the uh...
I should've used colored water
You can see there is a definite increase in the height of the water over here
and over here, there is a decrease
About the same amount too as you'd expect
In fact, if I add those two Heights together, I'd probably get right about a centimeter, so not a whole lot
But then the height here is not very much either
Let me actually go through and calculate how much I would actually get if there was just a single loop
Okay, what have we got?
Looks like 40
Let's call it 45 degrees centigrade there
It does have ice in it so maybe I should just say it's zero
It is only zero at the top
the bottom of the jug appears to be about five so we've got a column height of
About a hundred and forty millimeters or fourteen centimeters
This here, which we will double
That's six millimeters, so
Let's call it 12 millimeters for the total displacement we got
And here's how the density of water changes with temperature
So if I had a column that was a meter tall and another column same height one was full of water
That was four degrees and one was full of water that was...
45 degrees
density of
1,000 kilograms per cubic meter on this, the cold side
And 990 on the warm side
That would mean that the differential over about a meter
Would be about one centimeter.
So the water on the warm side would be pushed up by the cold side by about one centimeter
So about one part in 100
with this
14 centimeters, I would expect 1.4 millimeters of
Displacement, but I'm actually seeing 12 millimeters,
so this thing does appear to work
So I've got how many how many stages does this have? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9?
if I multiply the
the 1.4 millimeters, you know 0.14 centimeters times 9
Look at that
12 millimeters
It worked exactly as I thought it would
that's brilliant
I mean
I was kind of hoping to see something push the water up really high, but
This is... This is a result
Cool.
Let's build a little bit larger scale version of this
So here's the larger version that I've come up with.
It is six feet tall
It's got glass inside of a box so that the Sun can heat it instead of using hot water
It's got 22 wraps of the tubing so that's over
260 feet of this black tubing,
and I'm expecting a head
well, I suppose it depends on the temperature I can get but assuming I can get a 30 degree
differential
And I should be able to get over a foot of head off this thing
So I'm just sticking it up against this so it can have a nice good view of the Sun
now actually I have two sets of tubes in this one that goes around 22 times one that just goes around once and
See the once-around
Has already got a displacement of?
Just under a centimeter by the looks of it considering that the main pump has
22
Loops I should be able to achieve
22 times this height right here, and the one that goes around
22 times
We might actually have a problem here I
Used to have a bunch of air up in this line, and it's pumped that air bubble around
It's probably making the rounds already
So it does work so the temperature of the shade behind the thing is
8 and 1/2 centigrade
Half the tubes are in the back here in the shade, right?
Then half are over here in the heat now if I stick this thermometer in the hot side we can see
Just what this temperature differential is that's a tight fit? I oughta wring that out?
Alright, that's a little easier. Just stick that thermometer in there
Now we'll be able to see what temperature is in there, but you can see already that
The water is being pumped up at least four inches
That's pretty cool
It's kind of hard to cease fast the condensation, but it looks like the temperature is about 41 and a half degrees centigrade right now
So that means I've got 30 degrees
differential that I wanted
Excellent
So yeah, we should be getting about 1% of the total
column height
worth of displacement
So you know this 4 inches is nothing for it, but of course that's the maximum in this place
I'm not sure if I raise this up that would pump slower
It has to actually heat the water more before it can finally force it through
Yeah, it's uh four inches of displacement seems to be working just fine
Of course that will increase as this gets pumped down up to about
Probably 30 centimeters are about a foot
worth of displacement
Once this is almost completely gone
we'll see if it's able to do that by the end of the day
I kind of have doubts
And so this thing is gonna be really inefficient. you see in order to pump through
The amount of liquid that's in one of these
Tubes going up now a pump that volume up it also has to heat not only
That much of the cold water, but also that much of the cold water that was on the entire
Back side so in order to move just one of these volumes, which might be around 10 milliliters. It has to move
22 times as much see you around here on back the tubes
Are still very warm see something like almost 100 degrees there? It's 37 degrees centigrade
And they have to cool off after radiates away their heat
and it looks like it takes all the way down to here before they get down to the
temperature of the shadow see
So not only do I have to heat the water, I also have to radiate away that heat
20-some odd times to pump just one a little bit of water through yeah
There's a lot of room for improvement with this design like some sort of heat exchanger to cover the heat is definitely needed
But it still works
I'll see if it's able to pump that jar into that jar by the end of the day. I got my time-lapse set up
See how it does
Well that's doing its thing I wanted to show you guys kind of how it came up with the idea
so if I had two columns
They're both full of water, and they're connected at the base. Just like this and
On one side you've got it warmed up
So you got a heater or something on this side
Just like that the water in the side that's being heated is going to expand, and if this is a 30-degree difference
That should be about
1% of its volume increase and so if you have your water level here
And this is a meter tall
You would find that your water level in the warm column is now
one centimeter
taller than in the cold column, that's because the cold water and the
warm water
Have to have the same amount of weight of water on either side so the pressures on
Either side down at the bottom are equal. If this level is lower. The pressure over here because there's less dense
There's less water on top of it
The pressure will be lower and the pressure over here is gonna force it through this side now to increase this
This height this head right here
There's a few things you can do one is you can heat up the water even more make it even hotter
but eventually you can wind up of water, that's boiling or
You're just wasting so much heat another thing. You could do is make this much taller
That would make this 10 centimeters now right because it is proportional
But eventually you're gonna run into a problem
If you start doing this in order the pressure at the bottom of these columns is gonna be so great
The water's gonna start spraying out
right
Even if they're made out of metal that's a lot of pressure the thin plastic
Tubing I'm using well if it's warmed up
I wouldn't
Trust it beyond that
pretty much
What I thought of doing is add the reservoir up here all right let the water flow over into it
Now you can pump the water from a lower reservoir into a taller one
Now they're only a centimeter
They're so different, but that difference is there now what I can do is take the water from this resolume
Let's just cool it down and run it into
another column now I can have another reservoir up here and
Continued going eventually I can just stack the heights
more and more and more
Until I'm gone water pumped up a hill essentially
But then I realized the pressure is
Going up, right
What do I need the?
Reservoirs for? well I'll just simplify it and just run the water straight across
Like this basically use the tube itself as the upper reservoir
And so now after I've got you know four things the same temperature differential if you're heating and cooling and heating and cooling
Then I've got
You know four centimeters of hit
it's not an efficient way to do it but
This does work
If you somehow add like a heat exchanger or something in here. I'm not really sure at the moment. How you do that
You know somehow get the heat from this
Tube to go over to here to keep this water up as it's going into the next column
You could make it more efficient
now
I'm not sure if I've invented this. I I'm pretty certain
I haven't is so simple somebody must have come up with it, but I haven't seen something like this in a simple Google search so
There you go
I was thinking a possible use for this would be my shrimp boxes
I think I mentioned this earlier if I had a bunch of those boxes on top of each other and I had
Grass and moss and water down at the bottom
Eventually the water especially if these are connected the water is gonna migrate down
You know the water vapor might come back up but salts and stuffs are gonna go down. I get trapped
You know just like they do in real life, but
in salty Lakes
But I don't have rocks and geologic processes bringing those salts back up
So I need something to bring the salt back up, and I don't really want to use like a little pump or anything
So I was thinking what I might be able to do is make the whole bunch of the real thin glass tubing
Some capillary tubes and wind them between a hot and the cold reservoir
And get this to pump up even a single drop of
Salty water being pumped up every day would be enough to sustain the system
Anyway, that's one possible use for this that I thought of
Yeah, it looks like we're pretty much done
This shadow from the house has moved over on to it
And I think it's actually stopped pumping. It's been almost exactly an hour
It looks like we moved around 200 milliliters give or take
Four or.. five inches
Yes, I am aware that a solar panel this big hooked up to an electric pump could have pumped
A jar full of water all the way to the top of this and a couple of seconds
But that's not the point of this test
Hope y'all enjoyed I'll see you next time
(Epic time-lapse :)