Pumping Water After the Grid Goes Down

Grid Failure is one of the more likely scenarios for TEOTWAWKI-Day and dying of thirst three days later will probably be an unavoidable consequence for a lot of people. The deeper a person lives in a metropolitan zone the more likely they will be to have to bug out in hopes of finding drinkable water (somewhere!) that hasn't already been polluted by the Unwashed Masses.

On this thread I will consider us Prepper-types that either Bug-In, or have a viable place to Bug-Out to when things go bad.

Later on in this thread I 'll see about posting plans for a manual surface pump that a person can make out of (mostly) PVC in a day for pretty small change. Having a pump like that on hand and ready to set up can ease a person's worries considerably.

First, however, I'd like to share a way to make a pump like that run without electricity.

No gens, bats or solar cells. No windmills. All manual, but with almost zero sweat.

A few years ago I ran across a very interesting invention called a 2-stage mechanical oscillator. I studied it quite deeply. It has some remarkable properties.

Imagine two kids on a . One is fat, and one is skinny.

The skinny kid can't raise the fat kid on an even , so he lengthens HIS side by 300%, planning to get a little leverage to help him out.

No joy. The fat kid is just too fat.
Finally the skinny kid starts hanging from his side of the like a monkey, and swinging back and forth.

Pretty soon, he's got the fat kid bumping up about six inches on every swing, because momentum is a Wonderful Thing.

The skinny kid will never get the fat kid up level, but he can bump him all day long.

Except that his arms get tired,

So the skinny kid hangs a weight just as heavy as he is from a rope as long as his arms are, and starts THAT swinging.

Well, physics being as they are, the same weight, the same swing, the same momentum, and the fat kid starts getting bumped again.

Now here is where it get's interesting.

The , the weight, the rope, and the fat kid are a two-stage mechanical oscillator.

And what happens is this: As the weight swings, the fat kid bumps up. When he bumps back down he PUMPS the swinging weight.

So it keeps on swinging. And bumping the fat kid up, and getting pumped when the fat kid goes back down.

The weight won't swing forever, but it'll swing MUCH longer than it would as a simple pendulum.

Take a mechanical water pump. The kind that one or two grown men would have to slave over all day in the hot sun to pump enough water for...irrigation, let's say.

On the other hand, if a 70-lb weight is attached to the pump handle with a suitable "", the skinny kid can start the weight swinging, and once the bumping starts, the water will come out like two grown men were pumping it hard.

But the skinny kid won't even break a sweat because, about every fifth swing, he can give the weight a little poke with one finger, and keep the weight swinging, and the water pumping, all day long.

I know this sounds weird. But I've seen (and done) the math, and I've seen the videos.

It's a machine that works very, very, efficiently, and it's simple enough to rig up with little more than an old engine block, a bit of chain, and a stolen .

(Well--it doesn't HAVE to be stolen. You can make your own pretty easy.)

I have all the data in my files. It'll just take a little excavating to get down to it.

Starting this thread now (even though this all probably sounds like a stone tease) will motivate/commit me to dig it out and post it.

It may be a couple of days, 'cause I'm busier than a one-legged man trying out for Dancing With the Three Legged Stars, but I'll find it and get it posted.

 

I don't know where all the little s came from.
At first I figured it was some automatic program, but when I type in "beautiful naked ladies" nothing happens.

See?

Oh well. Sigh.

 

Sounding like burlesque, all tease ; )

 

Looking forward to your info specs with pics ........

 

So did he give measurements for weighting it?

 

I just Googled "2-stage mechanical oscillator water pump" I watched one of his vids... something lost in the translation.

 

Directory:Milkovic Two-Stage Mechanical Oscillator - PESWiki

Welcome to the World of Pendulum Power - Veljko Milkovic's Two-Stage Mechanical Oscillator - Official presentation

 

Wow! There's a lot posted here I wasn't expecting to see.

Crayola me shocked!

I dug into my files.
The home page is Veljko Milkovic - Home Page - Official presentation of the researcher and inventor Veljko Milkovic

It goes on from there. There's a lot more on the website now than there was two or three years ago.

Math types can have a lot of fun with this, but it's all been worked over pretty thoroughly.

Rude & crude dudes that just want to bang things together and make them work can get a good set of proportions, at which point explaining how & why it works is essentially unimportant. It's what it does that matters, not how, particularly.

I have a copy of the mathematical proof of the hyper -efficiency (dare we say over-unity?) aspect of the oscillator.
The math checks out. Basically, you put in 1 bucket of sweat, and you get out eight buckets worth of gen-u-ine work.

The video that azrancher posted is the one I was going to find and post. The operator is making a small but significant error: he's poking (pumping) the weight on every swing, instead of about every fifth swing.

So however little effort he putting in, he's putting in five times more than he needs to.

Now this thread was started as a purely manual solution to pumping water, but if the skinny kid has homework to do, there must be a dozen ways to mechanize the pumping of the weight.

Have the fat kid do it. He's been on the long enough, already.

 

I'm definitely not disagreeing with BTPost, but there are some machines that operate in a non-Newtonian manner. It's the difference between the operation of "simple" machines, and "other-than-simple" ones.

Newton was one of the sharpest guys that ever walked the Earth, but he missed a few tricks that I know about.

With the oscillator, If you ignore the environment, all the physics will say nothing happy happens. But that's like putting a water wheel in a dry stream. Obviously, in complete agreement with Newtonian physics, the wheel will not turn.

Monsoon starts, different story. An unconsidered aspect of the environment now affects the waterwheel.

But even then, taking the force of the water into account, everything is still legal in a Newtonian sense. When the environment changed, so did the performance of the water wheel.

The oscillator is sort of like that. It''s operating in a flow of "water" (force) called gravity, but that pesky little weight keeps jumping out of the flow. Just as it stops rising, it's weightless. And that adds a whole new dimension to the action, and the math that explains it. It starts getting completely Newton- legal when you account for the weightlessness, physics-wise, and the mystery of it just fades away. And 1+1 still equals two. The extra energy in the system is accounted for.

It wasn't that Newton was dumb, in the things he missed (of which the math that explains the oscillator is NOT included). It's more like there were some physics problems that he never chanced to investigate, which IF HE HAD would have caused him to add a few more Laws to his Physics.

 

There is no free lunch. If you are going to pump 1 gallon of water to an elevation that is 10 feet higher, that requires 83 lb-ft of energy to accomplish. If the pump doing the lifting is powered by some kind of pendulum engine, it will require 83 lb-ft (26.89 calories) of energy input (and that is with a 100% efficient engine which incidently doesn't exist) to keep the pendulum device swinging and the pump pumping, otherwise the pendulum will stop cold and the pumping will stop cold. If the engine and pump are 50% efficient (still phenomenally good) it will require 166 lb-ft of energy input to keep the pendulum swinging and the pump pumping.

Think of a kid on a swing. Once dad gets him swinging 6 feet high, it does not take much effort to keep him swinging. The period of oscillation (time between each push from dad) is a function of the force of gravity, the mass of the kid, and length of the ropes on the swing. This is a mechanical oscillator. But if the kid drags his feet doing work moving dirt below the swing to create a hole, dad has to work much harder keeping him swinging 6 feet high. Moving water, moving dirt, same difference.

The math is quite solid on all this. It's generally a second order differential equation with a sinusoidal solution.
Oh yeah, interestingly for both the kid on a swing or the teeter totter, one of the elements of the equation of motion comes from Newton's second law and it's what creates the second order to the differential equation.

AT

 

You are absolutely correct, ghrit. The mathematics of closed systems are definitive.

I have danced with the Gods of Thermodynamics and found them mathemadical.

Oops. I'm getting too far off topic. So where on this Board does a person go for the really whacked-out threads like Space Aliens, & Things That Go Bump in the Night?

I'm about half-way thru my bottle of Mint Tequila, and I'm waxing Philosophical.

(It's ok--mint is a vegetable.)

 

Airtime: YES!!!

Take a run thru the proof document and see if you find anything unusual in the mathematical model.

I can just about guarantee you'll enjoy the exercise.