This is similar to how an electronic boost converter works. The water's inertia is like an inductor, and the output check valve is like a diode. The other check valve is like a switch.
I love how sometimes, the math that is used to describe certain things in classical mechanics is the same math that is used to describe certain things in circuitry. For example, if I remember correctly, the math that is used to describe a spring mass system is extremely similar to the math that is used to describe an RLC circuit. How fun is that?
@Ethan Renckly Pretty cool. Like pulse tube cryocoolers have a resonant frequency like an LC circuit. And impedance matching is kind of like a perfectly inelastic collision between two objects.
@@YSPACElabs I only knew about half of those things because of my AP physics teacher in high-school, as well as the engineering classes I took in high-school (Principles Of Engineering and Digital Electronics). I'll try to remember the rest of that stuff for Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering which I will no doubt take in college. So, thanks, I guess.
@@ethanrenckly787 The pulse tube cryocooler info was from Hyperspace Pirate, and the impedance matching was from stuff I read online and from my own intuition. It makes sense, so it might be correct.
@@YSPACElabs Hey, to be fair, most of the more random stuff I don't learn in school (which is most of it) I learn by reading online. I also want to mention that most of the math I know beyond pre-calculus was either taught to me by my AP physics teacher or self taught, which means I understand concepts beyond calculus 3 (my favorite math is complex analysis, specifically iterative complex analysis). It's also due to this fact that despite my understanding of these concepts (with the exception of basic complex analysis), I can't solve a lot beyond pre-calculus by hand. Wolfram Alpha is a very useful tool.
If you're familiar with water hammer, that is precisely what is happening here. Water will flow downhill, and once it's moving, it has kinetic energy. If you suddenly slam a valve closed, all of that kinetic energy has to go somewhere; typically into the nearby plumbing, causing a sudden jolt of increased pressure ("water hammer"). In this case, there's a convenient place for it to go: up the tube. And so it does. If there's a large mass of water and/or it's moving quite fast, it can have a lot of kinetic energy. This increased pressure can be many times higher than the head pressure of the water's static mass under gravity, which can cause big problems if there's no safe place for all the energy to go. Water is relatively incompressible, so a typical solution is to add a surge tank nearby that contains a compressible fluid (gas) - this way the energy will be spent more gently by compressing that gas, causing a much more gradual change in pressure instead of a massive spike. The water will surge into that tank, and as the gas in the tank is compressed it will start pushing back, slowing the water down gradually until it stops flowing, reverses, and eventually the compressed gas will push that extra water back out of the surge tank and the system will return to static equilibrium.
He glossed over the important part. The kinetic energy of the water cannot exceed the potential energy it had when it was in the bucket. So on the face of it it would appear that even if you made this 100% efficient and recovered all of the kinetic energy, it could never pump water higher than the source. The key is that this is only true for kinetic energy per unit volume of water. By setting a long train of water in the pipe moving, you're able to harvest the kinetic energy from the entire volume of water in the pipe, to pump a small volume of water higher than the source. It's analogous to dropping a basketball with a tennis ball stacked on top of it. When the basketball hits the ground and tries to bounce, its kinetic energy gets transferred into the tennis ball, causing the tennis ball to fly much higher than the drop height. Whereas if you just dropped a basketball, it couldn't bounce higher than the drop height. That's why the waste water coming out the lower valve is important. Without it, this would happen just once, then the kinetic energy in the water remaining in the pipe would be insufficient to get it back up to the source bucket level (the basketball just rolls around on the ground instead of bouncing). And the whole thing would stop. By allowing water to bleed out the bottom, you allow the train of water in the pipe to build up to full kinetic energy again, so you can repeat the process.
The surge tank you're describing is actually also pictured. That tube on the left that is capped is filled with normal air (just like a surge tank) and it takes up some of the water hammer pressure. Once the valve is closed the air tries to return to it's normal pressure and pushes more water up the tube. This is why you see the ram closes so suddenly, but the release of water out the top is just a BIT more gradual. It's because of that little surge tank taking up some of the pressure. His setup doesn't really need it for the demo to work, but it's extremely important for people that are using ram pumps to move hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per year, in their hydroelectric off grid pelton systems.
The RU-vid channel “Practical Engineering” has a great video on Ram Pumps which is worth a look in my opinion (Also Water and Steam Hammer for more technical and non-ram pump applications)
I'm proud of your commit, sir. He could have made that analogy. Also: *He could have EASILY obtained efficiency data from this.* Also, he could have cut the rubber tubes to length.. It feels pretty lazy for the standards we've learned to expect from him, because it would have only taken him 10 more minutes plus 5 minutes of thinking to pull off a FAR better experiment than the one he did here. Him not even explaining what the original poster explained here was extra laziness.
Ordinance Survey maps show hydraulic rams which were installed in Victorian times to supply water to houses many metres in elevation higher than the source, usually a spring. They also used a device called a jack pump.
because modern education is about training you to prepare for a dull tedious life of 9-5 workdays. they dont want you to think. how could knowing this be of any benefit to a bean counter stuck at a desk in a cubicle somewhere? you are just a number, a statistic. you want something that you wont find described anywhere? that uses basic physics? that is possibly THE most efficient engine ever devised by man? research "humphrey pump". think ram pump.. but add air, fuel, and an ignition source. pre ww1, was overlooked and forgotten due to the war... and as it only pumps water, it sort of seems useless. people forget about hydraulic power when confronted with concepts that require a bit of knowledge not supplied by the so called "education system".
Love this little engineering masterpiece. Actually invented in England by Clockmaker Whitehurst ~1772, or in France about the same time. Montgolfier had one. A Swedish engineer, find one in France early for 1800-something.,BUT it hadn't any automatic valves. You have to open/close valves manually. That Swedish guy, engineer J O.Lundberg, took a patent in 1896 ( begun selling them in ~1893). Product was baptized Vädur, Vædur (Ram in English). Try to get a pic in here, no it didn't work my way. It was sold all around the world. Sold in it's original design until ~2000. Perhaps today. As young boy I saw that miracle! Without any external power keep pumping 24/7?? All the water flooding around was the power I understand (and forget) as an adult. I think, easy estimated, 90% was spilled to pump the left 10%. But it pumped it to a HIGH level. I still love it, and among bicycle it's a sustainable invention.
Ram pumps take 2 cm of potential energy and transform it into 5 m of potential energy. Yes, they lose a lot of water to do so, so it can't feed itself, but otherwise they are the closest we have to free energy. They are magic even if you understand how they work
its not free energy, you have to pour water into bucket, and if bucket size is big, manual filling won't work, so you will need a machine to fill bucket, and hence it's not free.
Simple fix for the waste. Use a catch basin(a kid pool) and an appropriately sized syphon hose to refill the first bucket. Get that perpetual motion going.
Is there a pump that uses the same concept continuously instead of in pulses? I'm picturing water flowing downhill turns a water wheel, which powers a pump that pushes a smaller quantity of water uphill?
Great informative video overal. Too bad the person filming with a cell phone didn't turn the phone to landscape - would have improved the video dramatically
Lol.super intresting i didnt catch on till i saw the waste water coming out,then i had a good idea what was going on.very cool.maybe u could daisy chain a few of those together to reduce the waste water,by recycling it into another chain?
Please try this:- Wireless charger have copper coils, even phone have. when we turn on, the first coil will start producing magnetic field. But instead of coil can we place a magnet?
One of these installed in a pool of some size , which has an outflow connected to it , could act as a pump to power a small waterfall , if one were to be a fish breeder and needed to have the running water , along with the higher oxygen levels , to obtain better health for the 'proficts' and provide some current , for exercise . Even a home aquarium, would benifit from one .
I feel like the efficiency might change if you traded out the Tee fitting for a Wye fitting on the first valve. It seems like there would be less turbulence in the system.
You have a hydraulic ram pump. what about a hypothetical resonance hydraulic ram pump it has no valves it uses resonance to force it to switch back and forth like many other examples of resonance including making sound by blowing across a bottle
I'm interested in that myself. What it might be is basically an empty tube filled with air. Something like this can be used in household plumbing to prevent water hammer, the air acts like a spring because it is compressible. When the sudden pressure spike of the water comes through that second valve in the system, I think it might tend to compress the air in that tube and then the air will decompress more slowly and feed the water into the rest of the system where it exits from the top. It may be that without this the sudden pressures shake with shake the whole system and possibly waste the energy he's trying to use to lift the water.
I’ve followed actionlabs since he uploaded to Facebook. Those were early days. Have to give props to getting over 3million subs in RU-vid. It’s well deserved
Put a hose on the waste water valve and let empty back in the bucket. You just need a smaller diameter hose. It will continue to recirculate until evaporation requires you to top it off.
I understand that perpetual motion is not possible, but when I first saw this working, I immediately thought, “ holy crap! Could that actually be a true Perpetual motion machine? A Second later, my dreams were shattered when he showed the valves 😂
Route the water from both sources so that it turns turbines connected to small generators connected those generators to a pump that pumps the waste water from the bottom back up to the bucket. You could even add a turbine and generator in the initial drop tube to get additional energy to add back in to the system. While is is still not going to be a perpetual motion machine, it will allow the system to run longer.
So interesting. One can collect all wasted water and addit again to the original bucket at a latter time. There you go, you got a manual-fountain-hour-glass-style device.
Absolutely yes, theoretically. Since you get a little over 3 psi for every 10 feet of liquid height (water) if your source is high enough, you could get very high pressure at your nozzle.
I was wondering if such a system could operate without loss of water and no machine There could be a pipe of greater width bringing the water down and at the bottom, it can be connected to a pipe of much smaller diameter so now the water will have more pressure and will go up. Would it work??
No, for the same reason that a wide column of water will not push a narrow column of water higher if they are connected at the bottom: they have the same pressure throughout their height.
@@areadenial2343 Yep, which is either very good or very bad news depending on what you're trying to accomplish. The good news is that if you're using a vertical pipe with a large cistern at the top to feed a turbine, for example a Pelton or Tesla turbine, with a narrow jet at the bottom, it doesn't really care whether the pipe is narrow or much broader provided that you can get enough water flowing through it to drive the turbine. It also means that you can hold back millions of gallons of water with a relatively small dam, provided that the reservoir is only a few feet deep.
I’ve already seen and liked this video. Does YT only allow so many likes? I know they have a liked playlist that can contain 5K videos. Is that how many videos you can like and then once you go over the 5K they just unliking the ones that are getting bumped?
Why couldn't you have the waste water feed into a reservoir that ultimately feeds the source reservoir? Say this were a man made stream and the goal was to take the water at the end of the stream and transport it to the beginning of the stream that was at a higher elevation and the whole thing is generating electricity through the use of many little water wheels.
So, with this apparatus, and The Nile being nearby, The Pyramids of Giza, could have been just a bath house after all. Probably with a Royal Flush toilet. Boo yah!
Very interesting. But instead of saying no energy is being added to the system and being mysterious about it, I was waiting for the trick. Might have been good to just get to that.
You are harnessing energy by sacrificing a portion of the water to dump below the system. I had to explain that to a friend that often believes people are hiding these magical ideas. Nope, you just have to pay attention in school.
