Gravity Booster Pump [Proof Of Concept], Better Than A Ram Pump?

this is a prototype gravity powered water pump it takes pressurized water in this case a little over six psi almost seven psi of water coming in from a bucket and it directs that water via a valve that's hooked up to a water seesaw this valve directs water to a pair of pistons now these are special pistons which don't have any sliding seals this is an airbag out of like a car and that is a rolling bellows diaphragm piston i think made by bellafram corporation so on a pumping cycle here pressurized six psi water fills this up which creates higher pressure water in the smaller piston which is directed out to this garden hose which goes up to a tank on the hill in this case i'm pumping up to 17 psi output from a little under seven psi input so the pumping stroke goes here out through the garden hose on a retract stroke and exhaust stroke i have the water comes back and fills up the water seesaw just reusing some of the water to increase our water efficiency a little bit there we get a little bit of water efficiency out of that this is the bypass valve that allows me to fill the sea salt with the six psi pressure water into the seesaw and i can adjust how fast it cycles based on this i can also add some counterweights to adjust the cycling uh force or speed or duration based on you know counterweights which is pretty important because you saw a stroke there there's a lot of resistance on the valve because of the 17 psi water so i needed to adjust the weight to get the valve spool out sufficiently i'm joe malovich and this is a video about water pumping with no external power required this pump can be used to pump water flowing down hillside to higher elevations above the starting point of your collection system it's just the power of gravity pushing water downhill and if you're watching this video you've probably heard about ram pumps which use a water hammer effect my pump in this case uses no water hammer effect it's a challenge to myself to invent something new as you already saw in the first few seconds of the video i succeeded while working as an engineer i came across something called a haskell pump the problem with a haskell pump is it uses standard line pressure from a compressor of air to increase the hydraulic pressure for driving hydraulic pistons and whatnot so the only problem here is first we have pressurized water as the source and we're trying to produce higher pressure water so again that's not really suitable for a pump that's meant for air and hydraulic fluid those are completely different materials along the same lines of what i was thinking about there's something called a high lifter pump the only downside with a high lifter pump is it has to be highly filtered water because there are sliding seals in the pistons now my pump does have sliding seals in it but not in the pistons just in the valve itself it has a finite pumping ratio of around 4.5 to 1 or 9 to 1. so i set out to build something cheaper with fewer drawbacks i knew there was at least one way of getting linear motion out of dirty media and that's something called a bellows pump now obviously these are meant for air and can't do high pressure so i have to find a different solution another type of non-sliding cylinder that i decided to disregard is a diaphragm piston commonly used in diaphragm pumps the problem with them is you can't find them individually without the pump and they have a very short stroke so you can't really do anything with the stroke anyways moving on anybody who has any knowledge of cars knows about airbag suspension and of course airbags can take water especially since they're just rubber cylinders so i found some cheap ones on ebay a large one and a small one but the small one this works okay but it has a lot of resistance to move this little bit it takes a lot of force and if you pull too far it undoes itself in this case it has an airport here and a screw and another screw hole so airbags come in a few different shapes one is a rolling lobe like this and then the other one is the bellows which has convoluted bellows i guess you could call them and then there's also a rolling diaphragm which is essentially this but instead of this having to withhold pressure it's encased in a cylinder so this can be much thinner and more pliable and not have a lot of resistance when you try to move it so i found a rolling lobe diaphragm and it turns out that they screwed together for the valve i have experienced from 10 years ago when i was doing research for a pneumatic can crusher that i saw other people using exactly this type of valve a five port valve to direct air into and out of a cylinder like a push and a retract stroke so you have a supply and then two output ports and those go to the cylinder and then there's two more ports that are the exhaust from when the cylinder is pushing the air on the other side of the cylinder has to go somewhere so that's where the five ports come from supply two action ports and two exhaust ports so i found one with half inch ports which screwed into pex fittings so i can very cheaply prototype the entire thing now the valve hooked up with some pex to the air piston so i open this see if i can put it closer close by there we go now we can see it all so it's in it would be filling the small cylinder now and i switched the other one it fills the big cylinder which pushes the water from the small cylinder out and then this exhausts the big cylinder and we just would do that over and over and then hopefully we make a water pump out of that then i 3d printed some templates for end caps and cut those out using some scrap steel it's very slow but it does work and it's not automated i have it going into this hose now this valve has a very small actuation range too a quick explanation that four inch diameter airbag will at six psi of water exert 75.6 pounds of force that same 75.6 pounds of force exerted on the small cylinder which is approximately 1.7 equivalent square inches will exert 44.5 psi on the internal fluid so 44.5 divided by 6 is 7.4 to 1 so this will lift 7.4 times higher than your source water theoretically okay i have a direct action setup hooked up and it's not quite working if i push it all the way one way but i have to fully like actuate it no except i take this stick out i'm trying to actuate the valve directly with the motion of the cylinders and i was hoping that some sort of over center weighted mechanism would have enough force to actuate the valve but that didn't really seem to be the case see it can go one way and then actuate the other way but then it stops it doesn't have enough over center power to do anything about this so i i think that maybe this arrangement is uh is a dud you can see here as i push it over it pushes in there and it fills up that and then it should go far enough to pull to pull the valve out and it has and it fills this it's just not the right lever arrangement there's not enough velocity and inertia to actuate this reliably for every cycle so some other sort of valving system needs thought up this project is uh taking a while to complete that's for sure anyways i have to somehow attach this valve body and the actuator here kind of see it move in there attach that to the rocker on this in order to get maximum pressure you do need to make sure that all the bubbles are out of the line and for this it's a relatively gentle slope in my yard it does take a little bit of time for all the bubbles to get out this is an earlier revision that you did not see in the first few seconds of the video this one has 2 inch pvc pipe and it is not sufficient for actuating reliably okay i'm running into a problem now and we're up to what is that three four a little over five psi incoming pressure and that's enough to put some resistance on the valve here and when it was first cycling naturally on its own it didn't have the full pressure so now it it'll cycle back and forth but then it just gets kind of stuck in the middle [Applause] watch it not do it this time yeah they're kind of just stuck in the middle and then it just drains out the edge it's not really a full cycle and then i tried having this plumbed into the the cycler here there it's stuck in the middle i had that plumbed into the cycler and it would go too quick it wouldn't get a full stroke out of the pump but you need a lot of water to get some inertia for it to go over so i think that maybe this the see-saw or cycler or whatever it's called is not um see that squirting out there is not torquey enough to actuate the valve so i'm gonna go to three inch because it's pretty easy to upgrade it's just a a slot cut in this two by four here that those pipes are resting and they're zip tied on and this is a little bit of a counterweight to counterweight the uh the angle iron on this side so i need to uh yeah replace all that i'll be back in a moment were you in my garage again you're always in there pooping if i leave the door open that's a more solid clunk for a cycle for sure i have a little bit of water collecting here so i'm going to drill a drain so that doesn't hinder my cycling or slow it down needlessly [Applause] ah that's better this side has it too i drilled an extra hole there it was well the first one i drilled was too far in and so that one i drilled a little further out but it's working i have the overflow the exhaust from that piston is plumbed into here so that aids in filling it up quickly and cycling quickly and being more water conservative i can adjust the uh the cycle time by adjusting that valve there and generally you would want the cycle time to be a full stroke so now it's got a little bit of a dead time here so that's sub-optimal but this stroke is about the right time does a full almost a full stroke i need to adjust it a little bit i need to move this plate out probably about a quarter inch because i'm getting a truncated stroke there i have this exhaust here plumbed to a garden hose have it looped up into a tree and we have water coming out it's not much it's cycles so it's in between strokes right now there got some water so it's definitely pumping up from down there to up there first i was running out of water i'm actually running this off spring water but my spring is not very well flowing right now uh the other problem is i have some pretty good leakage coming out of the end of the valve body here see it on a compression stroke here in a moment see it coming out here this uh i don't think this exhaust port is meant to be pressurized so i gotta do something about that definitely got something that's working pretty good now now there's not a whole lot of water coming out of my supply line my spring isn't flowing very much this is about all i can maintain continuously um the same spring is the one that i use for the turbine and this is a good example of why i'm not running it now because there's not a whole lot of water to run it but i can mess around with other things like this that i feel is a very water efficient if not water efficient then can run at lower water flow rates pump and so this new three inch pipe cycles the valve back and forth this valve that i had to put a little silicone in the end cap because the spool actually uh the spool protrudes into the end cap and that's how it releases the water for the exhaust i think maybe i'm not sure um but it was leaking out so i had to silicone that up there's an o-ring that should be there or some sort of gasket that's missing so i put something in there i have this delivery pipe coming up here up the steps on my porch it's not a higher elevation than than my supply buckets there it's actually a little bit lower in elevation but we do have water coming out of it and it'll drip drip drip and then it'll have a surge when it cycles the pump it's very slow extremely slow there we go so it's not a whole lot so it looks like i have a little bit of extra water that i could use to cycle it faster but we can see that even when the pump cycles it actually draw more water out of here and that overflow will reduce when it goes into a pumping cycle to fill up the big airbag [Applause] there see and it comes back now the airbag is full and it keeps flowing out here someone asked at least in my case so this is spring water it comes from down there there's a turbine pit down there that i have my hydroelectric turbine and then there's a pipe that runs way way up the hill there 760 feet of pen stock that runs way up there and it's around 270 feet of elevation so you might be asking why not just run that water into a storage tank like up here if i wanted to have water higher up why am i messing around with this and i say chicken butt no i say why not it's fun to experiment with new devices everybody's done a ram pump as far as i can tell nobody's done one of these and the way this works is uh think of it as two paths it either goes diagonally this way or diagonally this way so the center one is divided into this or this and if the center one's going over here then this one goes here and if the center one's going here then this one goes here now i have seen guys use a giant see-saw to pump the pistons directly and yeah that could work it just requires a much larger amount of water this i think is maybe a little bit more water efficient plus you can use a higher pressure feed for this of course somebody's trying to sabotage it in the morning with some rocks [Applause] some of you may be asking that's great but what if i don't have six psi of head what if i have instead half a psi of head or about two feet in this case okay well here we go there's a bucket right there not very high up above the pump so the the spring water goes into there so it's like zero psi at that point and it goes down this black hose to the pump here [Applause] and so at these low pressures if i hook up the exhaust from the the airbag the big piston to the fill assist that actually sabotages some of my uh pumping head pressure available significantly so i actually had to disconnect it and run it off of this trickle feed right here so it's got about two feet of head maybe a little bit more and fro so it goes into the green delivery pipe and it runs up here to this ladder stand and all right well it's just had a pumping cycle so we'll have to wait for it to cycle and here comes ta-da [Music] so it's pumping up about two feet from zero psi so it's uh about two to one pumping ratio at two feet and maybe even higher the only problem with this at lower pressures there's not enough pressure to really actuate the cylinders correctly you can see here next time it cycles it it doesn't actually travel a whole lot see that's about all our stroke is about quarter inch to 3 8 of an inch so maybe 10 millimeters a little less than 10 millimeters of stroke so see it's not got a whole lot of power to overcome the uh the spring hysteresis i think that's the right term of the rubber in this airbag as an example i set up this 55 gallon barrel up here at the highest point of my property right next to the corner post and i let it run all night and it collected about six inches of water in the tank so that is a fantastic result proof that it works although it is very slow i'd have to estimate it pumps around 20 to 25 gallons per day right now as it's set up now i can shut off the delivery pipe here and deadhead it to see what our maximum pressure is so easily over 70 psi at least at a a peak there and it's settled out at what is that around 52 54 psi we'll see if it goes any higher it's a little bit higher so we'll call it 50 52 psi safely so 52 psi divided by i'm going to call it 6.8 psi that's 7.6 to 1 ratio for pumping and that's direct so you could put that on a rocker lever to increase the force or you could get a smaller small piston or a larger large piston and accomplish even higher pressures if you want to at the expense of pumping speed there is a practical application for this on my property this is at the top edge of my property there's a fence right there you can see that's the literal top edge and here's where a ditch of water enters my property from up there and this flows for about six months of the year so i could use the water from this about six months a year in that pumping device to pump water up to a storage tank the storage tank up there that i showed you and i could use that for a whole bunch of other things the key point is that i could have pressurized water for different applications without having to use or detract any water from the hydro pen stock which actually runs right there up through that little valley this isn't the end of this series i have a whole lot of ideas for this especially with some very large airbags so we'll see we'll see what comes of that be sure to like comment and subscribe whenever you leave a comment that drives viewer engagement which increases the ranking in my video or whatever i'm sure there are many things that a lot of you have to say about this that i did wrong let me know about them in the comments you can support my channel by sharing this content with your friends you can support me through patreon you can check out any of the links in the description especially for my amazon links i get a little bit of a kickback for anything that you might click on there and i now have swag so check out another link in the description or you might have seen a little banner along the bottom of the video below the video of clothing that i have as uh an offering now that i contracted somebody to do some drawings for me and now they're on shirts so pick one up for yourself for example if you had a creek running along the lower portion of your property for example if you had a creek running roll were you pooping in my garage again darn chickens you

Channel: Joe Malovich

Views: 148,503

Rating: 4.7468572 out of 5

Keywords: ram pump, Waterwheel pump, spiral pump, free energy, perpetual motion, wranglerstar, invention, prototype, Waterwheel, turbine, homestead, hobby farm, stoney ridge, land to house, livestock watering, solar pump, solar water pump, spring water, gardening, sprinkler, permaculture

Id: S5Jnz5bKe_w

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020