Wirtz pumps are really clever 

Jonathan (from the video) wanted to answer a recuring question from the comments. Adding it to the pinned comment seemed to be the best approach. Here's Jonathan: Several comments ask: why not replace the spiral by wrapping the pipe round a cylinder instead? Some suggest this might actually be better than a spiral, but this isn't true. To see why, you first need to remember that air is much more compressible than water. Second, remember that, however the pipe is arranged, inside it are 'plugs' of water alternating with plugs of air. The first plug of air after the open end is under low pressure. The second is under higher pressure and so on. The innermost plug is under the highest pressure of all. As the air pressure increases, the volume of the plug decreases (this is Boyle's law). To maximise the pressure, ideally the plugs of water should be arranged like a set of left-hand brackets (((. Now, the circumference of the spiral decreases as we go towards the centre, and this fact helps to maintain the arrangement of plugs of water as the plugs of air shrink. The shrinking circumference makes up for the shrinking air plug length. End of Jonathan. That said, cylindrical pumps have been built and they work fine - they're just not optimal. The sponsor is Incogni: The first 100 people to use code SCIENCE at this link will get 60% off of: incogni.com/science

The fact that guy has it pumping 8 metres up his garden with no power other than the stream is incredible. I love this stuff.

I just love the fact he managed to get an entirely nature powered bog garden from a pump

This is the real life equivalent of bug exploits in video games.

You're always told to worry about airlocks as an apprentice plumber, but it's so unintuitive that I had to see it for myself to really appreciate how much force it can take to overcome an airlock. I installed a shower drain without enough fall, so when the house slightly moved in an earthquake, it started flowing backward. There was baaaaaarely enough room for an airlock to form, but once it formed it could hold a column of water like at least 5 times as high as the height of the hump that the airlock needed to overcome. That buoyant force is HUGE! Was worried about my repair, thinking I stuffed up the same job twice, when I got called back. Thankfully the tenants kid had just jammed multiple toothbrushes and pieces of fabric down the drain for whatever reason.

It's proof of the kind of great man you are when you're able to admit the one and only mistake you've ever made in your life. Props to you! Cheers.

It's worth mentioning with air locking that air is more compressible than water, which means for the air to exert as much force on the next stage of water, the water behind it has to be exerting more pressure on the air than it would need to on just more water. In your three-stage demonstration, the water and air have time to find their natural equilibrium such that the pressure being exerted between each section of air and water equalises with the outside air. So the air inside is uncompressed, and when the water is forced to move again, the air will begin compression before it starts exerting enough force to start moving the next section of water at the same rate as the water behind it. It's kinda like pushing a block of wood with another block of wood via a spring... but also up and over a hill.

ONCE AGAIN, I tip my hat to RU-vid. I was a horrible student in school. Even though I have a college degree I chose the path of least resistance in getting that degree. If I were in a class room and someone was trying to teach me the physics of a pump my eyes would just simply glaze over. Here, a combination of the comfort of my living room, the ability to re-watch portions of the video, the lack of stress from worrying about what was going to be on the test and the generally entertaining skills of the hosts and who he interviews results in genuine education. Needless to say, that education is also 100% free. Hats off to youtube. Thank you for your post.

To make the first smaller model work, you could make the diameter gradually smaller along with the radius, so the inner rings have the same volume as the outer rings.

What's really cool is that you don't need any back flow prevention valves with these. The air lock stops the reverse flow of water if it stops. I work in irrigation sales and engineering and this stuff always amazes me. The physics of any pump system and how to create pressure is just cool stuff.

Wow! This is why my AC leaks inside my room even though the tube is going mostly down. I am close to getting my PhD in physics and I did not know this at all. Thanks a lot for this video!

In the 90's I helped a primitive camp site make a water supply . It was a 100' deep 3" dia. bored hole in sandy soil with a pvc casing. With no mains power, and only 12 volt solar, we took a small air pump to inject air in to a 100' line which injected its pressure into an ascending 3/4" line up into a water tank, some 20' up above ground level. A check valve at the bottom of the airline prevented water from filling backwards up the air line. It worked great. The drawbacks being waiting for more water when the supply tank had not filled yet under heavy demand.

"the 2d fluid mechanisms explanations channel" is my favorite channel and i never miss an upload

Wonderful explanation!

This made me think of how some mechanical vacuum (and probably other) pumps are made, with two interlocking spirals, one static, and one spinning, trapping fluid towards the centre and out (or towards the edge and out, depending). They’re thin enough that they can be stacked and powered with the same motor, getting down to a pretty low pressure.

Hydra-Lock was a term an old boss of mine coined that would happen when torquing bolts when rebuilding transmissions. If there were any fluid in the blind holes, the seal of the part that was being torqued would sometimes fail due to a small amount of fluid being overlooked in the bottom of the hole not allowing matting surfaces to hold proper amounts of pressure.

This pump reminds me of a water ram, which has always seemed to me like (almost) getting something for nothing.

The amount of questions this answered for me about water in my long range water pipes over the hills is priceless. Thanks Steve.

I did something similar in javascript and browser graphics and made a spiral that goes in faster to maintain a similar volume for the incompressable liquid and a shrinking volume for the gas. I was just thinking in terms of compressing gas and using the raised liquid to also compress in a separate mechanism gas as it returns I had in mind two grooved panels of something, perhaps plexiglass would work for your needs and a sheet of metal for the spiral. It seems to me like teflon coating might be ideal.

Just had a thought. You can totally sidestep the problems of a change in radius by wrapping the tubing around a cylinder instead of spiraling inward. It'd also let you have an arbitrarily huge number of windings.

This is honestly the Wirtz pump design I’ve ever seen…

I always wondered about pumping water with a water wheel. Thanks for the demo.

I love the way the garden pump is using the flow of the river to cause pumping rotation. Quite ingenious.

I was so pumped to watch this and then it vanished! I thought I was going crazy.

Love seeing Matt Parker doing Matt Parker things and even cooler you both found reason to visit this amazing pump! It's always amazing to see older tech with such a novel approach to solving a problem.

*You need to have the vertical riser divided into small channels, to prevent the air bubbles rising too easily and rapidly.* I recommend using a bundle of small-diameter tubes. For convenient handling, you can stuff the bundle inside a larger tube. It might even help you to have most of the spiral divided that way too, as narrow channels. @SteveMould

6:04 I appreciate the irony that you initially thought surface tension was the problem in the maze video, and then when you make a video showing off a practical use of airlocking, surface tension is what stopped the first version of the pump from working.

I just realized why I like your videos so much. I’m not an engineer. I like to know how things work, but often your topics are a bit advanced for a casual learner like myself (funnily enough, not this video). But I’m still drawn to these videos. I think it’s because I’m a visual learner, and you present everything visually and with great attention to detail. Whenever I explain things to others I often wish I could manipulate the image, or diagram, or make it 3-D, or color different parts, all to make the explanation easier to understand. Even when I’m just explaining a project or setup or something to myself, I’ll often visualize in my head color-coded segments, or identifying numbers, or what the internal mechanisms look like when in action. You do that. The way you present your videos is very similar to the way my brain works. It’s pleasing to watch even if some subjects are a little beyond me. Thanks for so many great videos!

the energy of this video is so positive, calm and friendly thank u for sharing

If you're interested in pumping systems like this you could do a video on the physics behind a ram pump, great way of turning flow rate into head pressure.

I find the fact his pump is powered by the river as well very satisfying. It's really cool he was so happy to help you out as well

I love these! Here in Brazil we use something called "carneiro hidráulico" - I think it translates to gravity pump in English. But it's a way to move water up from a reservoir using only the water weight from it. You should take a look, I think you'll find it very interesting as it also uses pressure to move things up.

Somewhat to my amusement, I literally just independently invented this concept in my head a week ago. I did have a bit of a head start since I had seen concepts for spiral pumps, but they were limited to the center of the spiral, not several feet above the top. But I randomly got thinking about it and realized you could potentially pump it higher if done right. I actually came up with an idea that could potentially have a reasonably limitless height (meaning as high as you could build most structures that would need a pump, ie several hundred feet). It is purely abstract though, so I could easily have a lot of stuff wrong. But even though other people beat me to it by centuries, I think it is cool that I am able to come up with concepts like this on my own as well.

Since you like to do videos on fluid dynamics, I would like to see you talk about "bubble rings". How they are formed, why they rise to the surface so slow, and how they can merge.

I saw this pump mechanism being used on the White Nile in Uganda, it used the fast flowing water to spin a water wheel on which the spiral was mounted. I have always wondered how it actually worked

This is remarkably similar to the way a scroll compressor works in an air conditioner

Amazing explanation, just love the fact that they exist an automatic free water pump that works with just the a stream of water😊

This video is a shinning example of how collaborative work can reach the whole world 😀

Also an interesting pump mechanism ist the hydraulic ram pump. I've seen these pumps a few times here in the Swiss Alps when alpine herders had to pump water to higher ground without electricity.

I've seen a pump like this used 'backwards' as a gas-meter. Gas flows into the center bit, causes the spiral to rotate. A counter keeps track of rotations. The working fluid part would be an oil of some sort.

Would be great if this was taught in schools. The same lesson where you learned about joined vessels and levels being the same... would totally blow kids minds with a plot twist where air enters the tubes and changes the picture completely. Like at 1:40

I am amazed that after all this years I took an interest in such topics there still are apparently lots of seemingly simple topics and effects I never came across or thought about. Brilliant!

I love how he could have just used transparent tubing in the first design, but of course Steve built a transparant cut-through version

The version that spirals all the way to the center might actually work as a crude air compressor--the water can't compress which causes issues due to the diminishing available volume, but I bet the air bubbles that end up in the center will be slightly pressurized for the same reason.

very interesting pump indeed. it was indeed not the surface friction or such but instead the difference in relative proportions of the segments in general all segments will tend to only take the amount of efficiency/water as the smallest section+a little more due to the drain into the pipe as well as the spring effect of the air. the more stages difference the less of a effect but there remains a effec.

Honestly the shot of the earlier Wirtz pump is very beautiful, I absolutely love the contrast!

Cody's Lab made a version of this that works off of purely thermal gradient. I wonder if you could boost the effectiveness of the pump by doubling up and using both mechanisms at the same time. Additionally, I'd think that this would work best in the form a hose wrapped around a drum.

Thanks for the clear explanation, I have a gravity feed water system to feed 3 troughs for some cattle, every now and then it stops working and it is an airlock situation , I have put a tap in the air loop so I can bleed off the air and then it starts flowing again :)

Around 3 minutes, you did a way better job explaining why dehumidifier, HVAC, and humidifier drain lines are so critical to avoid any "humps" than EVERYTHING else I've ever read or understood.

There is a gold concentrating device that uses a similar spiral to seperate gold from the black sand. Not a plug, but I believe it's called the "gold wheel". It doesn't use an airlock, but it does use the geometry of a spiral to carry the denser gold up to the center of the spiral while the black sands are washed out by water.

Each slug of water also has its own surface tension battle to not get reduced to foam and allow the air to backflow

I genuinely love when you call out and correct your mistakes. That's engineering. Theorize iterate redesign, haha plus it's about knowledge over ego. 👌 Also he is Jonathan Deane if anyone else didnt read the description. Lol

Never heard of these before but as soon as I saw the image and title I had to concur. That is pretty clever.

I tried to make a spiral algae farm 'solar panel' using clear pipe and very soon had this effect stump me in reverse! The water lock on it was so high that my little eco pump couldnt overcome it from all the areas in the spiral and it didn't work! Great video and really amazing explanations as always! Thank you!

"I need to find a transparent version or it's not a Steve Mould video" Damn straight

@SteveMould I remember getting to see you live from a maths / science talk in Manchester back when I was in high school. It must have been at least 7 or 8 years ago. I think you demonstrated the Mould effect with the beads. I'm glad I fond your channel after all this time.

Two observations. The first is that If you used PTFE tubing this would minimise the adhesive effect of the water molecules on the tube lining. The second is that perhaps the tubing does not need to be a diminishing spiral but might consist of drum of equal diameter coils set along side each other; the last coil bridging the radius to a central rotary outlet. A further refinement might the use of a non-return valve at the rotary outlet to avoid the need for surface tension within narrow exit piping to perhaps allow a water butt to be filled at an inlet at its base. Fascinating stuff.

the way steve skips to the pump excitedly at 5:00 is so cute and awesome, truly has a childlike wonder for the things he shows us.

Wonderful explanation! I ran into this problem when distilling dichloromethane with a spiral condenser. The multiple airlocks generated enough pressure to pop the stoppers on the apparatus. Now I finally know why. Kudos!

I have sometimes designed an archimedes screw based space-toilet, but this is perfect! With the screw there is always certain kind of backlash or you need to use lots of water to make it functional, but this basically eliminates all the problems instantly! Oil pressing screw-type space-toilet could be interesting too, altough I think that would stink more than this.

Would love to see this vs a ram pump which similarly uses the power of the river to pump water to a higher level. The ram-pump is much smaller but I dont know if it's more efficient or effective.

I like your logic behind turning it by hand but I think a steady speed is important. Every time you stop and start I saw the top section of water lose it's airlock and flow down into the next - With steady pressure that may not happen. Hopefully you revisit this one someday!

The output at height should be in a reservoir of water too to slow the water lock air bubbles from rising and pulling in atmospheric air; this will result in greater delivery height.

Wow thats so weird (but also cool) to see. Jonathtan was my classical dynamics lecturer a few years ago when I was in uni. He did good for his students which was much appreciated and its great to see he is still passionate about his field!

Thanks! Great video as always! I humbly request, if convenient, that you update the maze video description with a correction regarding the reason for the liquid not fully draining.

You do some great videos, but this has been my favorite that I can remember recently! Corrections of past videos. Fascinating news concept. On location content from an expert in the field. Really, really liked this one!

It would be quite interesting to do all these tests that work because of the airlock you mentioned with water mixed with soap, because i imagine that these tests would be very different if the water lost its surface tension. Maybe the pump stops working or the maze would fill up all the way because the soapy water could not trap these air pockets anymore

The videos of yours that I've seen have been interesting, informative, and quite laid back. You look to put a lot of effort into your videos and you have a calming voice. Good stuff, sir.

Huh! I didn't know that air lock was cumulative. Thanks for teaching me something new! I work with water transfer and on the odd occasion, even with a diesel pump running, the source water wouldn't enter into the pump and be pumped to where it needed to go and I never knew why. This, I believe answers that question! The solution was always to remove the atmosphere from the water system, but this explains WHY!

In many ways this seems to be a version of the ancient Archimedes Screw, relying on gravity to provide some of the energy for the motive force moving the liquid. I'd be interested to see what modulations of the head pressure (water height) could be achieved by doing things like: changing the diameter of the vertical tube, adding a one-way valve, adding an air bleed valve, etc. Also, what effect having the spiral formed from a tapering cylinder, with quite a wide mouth (rather than the parallel-walled tube) would have on the system.

9:45 haha can you imagine the police walk round the corner at this point with that box full of what looks like blood water

The first 3mins 30sec of this video are the coolest thing on the internet I've seen in the last year!

I remember one of these on my grandpa’s farm, attached to a water wheel 7 or 8 feet in diameter. But it started out as 4” diameter and shrank in diameter, the closer the spiral got to the centre where it was about a 1” output 🧐

I think you need a smaller diameter rising pipe. You can see starting at 12:02 that there isn't enough surface tension to support the weight of the higher slugs of liquid, so they slowly spill downward through the adjacent air gap.

We have something similar at a "waterpark" (it's just a water path with multiple of these mechanisms) near where I live. But ours is different in the way that its open on one side (except for a small lisp to keep the water in) and also it doesnt push water upwards, only to the height of the center.

I will be building one of these for my garden. Thank you

My natural sciences teacher remarked on a similiar effect to the trouble you had with pumping water into the tube. He called it the pipette effect. I'm transliterating that from Norwegian and am not able to find a citation for it, so I expect it's known by another name. As I understood it it shouldn't have happened with a tube that diameter, but possibly the coloring added to the water made it more viscous. He was trying to explain to us how water will always, if in continuous contact, level out. Kids' stuff, but he was an excellent teacher so he had made a glass cutway device to demonstrate for us. The device had five vertical glass pipes of varying diameter, the largest probably two centimetres and the smallest in the low milimetres, connected at the bottom by a horizontal channel with a diameter of about a centimetre. The pipes were spaced maybe half a centimetre apart, edge to edge, and open to the air at the top. He called out the question of how the water would behave if he poured it into the largest pipe? We were kids, so the theories varied, but in the end most rallied behind the idea of the water levelling. And of course it did - except in the smallest pipe, where it squeezed higher vertically by about a centimetre compared to the other pipes. He said we were in essence correct, but that there were lots of oddities and exceptions in science that were equally fascinating as the truths and rules, and that he didn't expect us to know about or being able to hypothesize "the pipette effect" at age 10. It's funny the things you recall 30 years later.

Such a cool idea! You chain them to get higher and use the power of the water to spin them (like a series of water wheels)?

🤯using the mesh was a game changer 🎉thanks for the video

what really impressed me is this design is just a slightly diff. version of the archimede screw design that was used by the greeks and it was created around 250bc. also we still use the system in grain silos, waste treatment plants and of course pumping water. when this is around 10 times longer then we should be impressed with it.,

This reminds me of when I tried to get water out of a great length of coiled 1 1/4” plastic pipe. It was difficult. But I just kept rotating the coiled pipe

Steve, I'd love to see a video where you design a bigger version that you can either hand crank or run electrically or something similar and see just how high you can get the water to go using a reasonable design.

Thank you so much for shedding light on this early 'modern' technology! It's somewhat similar to another incredible water technology used almost two centuries ago in the North American West's mining bonanzas; that is Lester Allan Pelton's famous 'Pelton Wheel' of which there is a working replica at Disney's California Adventure in Disneyland Resort. His was a refined version of the water wheels mining companies were using for power, but the Pelton Wheel is unique in that it can draw incredible amounts of energy from even slow moving, or very low streams/rivers. They're actually still *very* popular in off-grid homes in Northern Canada like Yukon Territory and remote parts of Alaska where the mountain ranges give copious gravity-fed water sources in the spring and summer and are also STILL IN USE commercially in developing parts India and Asia much like the oldest parts of the British railroad in India/Pakistan.

When you spin it faster it causes the same effect as the old science experiment as a kid using a cup of water on a pendulum suspended platform and spinning it with great enough speed causing the water to stay in the cup. The surface tension & cohesion cause the water to stick to the points of the tube at origination giving the airlocks a chance to depressurize therefore leaking all the water out.

Keep up the awesome content, Steve!

That pump your friend has is awesome, this is honestly a ton more interesting than just some archimedes screw design. Those separate chambers of air are basically storing energy as pressure between packets of (virtually) incompressible fluid so it makes sense you get so much extra vertical movement out of it. I had made a passive drip watering system for a container garden on my deck and learned you pretty much have to always think of it in terms of communicating vessels and +/- pressurized air chambers when you want to imagine what will happen. I didn't vent the 5 gallon bucket feeding the half inch irrigation tubing and the pressure of water pulling out without air pulling in *completely* collapsed it. Like exactly like seeing those metal barrels be heated, sealed, and cooled and watch it crush itself.

amazing how you've never made a mistake in a video before and also how my family is completely safe

Thanks great video and update on the water maze and handy helpful sponsor!

It sorta looked like the river version had a thick tube in the river, leading to a thinner output tube. I wonder if that'd let you pump the water higher, and fix the problem where your air bubbles were escaping past the water in the vertical tube, compacting the load?

This is really interesting. It would be cool if you could also cover hydraulic ram pumps. I'd be curious which one is more efficient as well.

By signing up to that company you not only lose a wack load of money. But you give away your power of attorney do it your self. The compo is incredible

Home inspectors need to watch this.

You know the video is hella good when Steve felt compelled to reupload this fine piece yet again

So basically, the height that you can pump water to is proportional to the diameter of the tube rings times the amount of winds? (assuming they're all at relatively the same diameter, as in not going toward the middle like your first failed pump)

Yes sir, transparency is the most important thing to maintain 🙏🏻🙏🏻

huh, fascinating, never heard of a pump like this before but it seems to makes sense (air and water lock). That's really cool / amazing that it can pump to greater heights (no elec required)!

Not gonna lie, this is probably the coolest non-electrical way of water delivery I've ever seen. Placing this pump in a river to be powered by water flow is completely ingenious.

Great video Steve as always, demostrating the multipling effect of air fluidity in a sealed system, created by the air lock and water. As a mechanic this is something we try hard to avoid in cooling systems and Brake/ clutch systems as the air is compressable and leads the poor clutch and brakes or overheating. interesting to see it working in a positive way! As a mechanic there is something that is part of my daily work routine that has always confused me and would love to see you make a video explaining what is going on. I inflate car tyres to a given pressure while it is suspended off the ground and yet when I put it down and the weight of the car is pushing on those tyres, the pressure remains the same? Surly the 1 ton or so pressure of the car should increase the pressure in the tyre, yet it doesn't! why?

I rarely visit sponsors in videos, but this one actually got me interested because I've been getting calls from France and somewhere in India or something. Apparently my phone number has been sold (big shock, it was probably Facebook who sold it) and getting my data removed from these parasites would help me a lot.

I made one a couple years ago to pump water to a garden from a nearby stream, it worked quite well, even though it was slow since it runs 24/7 it turned out to pump quite a huge amount of water. The problem is when i built it I didn't know that the stream was actually some sort of drainage canal and the water level goes from about 30cm to 2m depending on the weather, it got washed away about a month later during the very first storm :( should have built it on a floating platform like you see sometimes here on yt