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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 19:57:37 :
In Reply to: All of this talk about water and power generating posted by Clint Dixon [74.206.62.94] on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 17:41:30 :
I haven't seen (heard) one of those operating for years. They're pretty clever. Used to hear them going out in the ranch country sometimes. I like the new one that can pump air too, but the cleverest water-powered air compressor I read about was something they used to compress air for a mine somewhere back in the 1800s. It had NO moving parts. What they did was had a vertical pipe with a fast current of water going down it. They had some kind of deal at the top end where the speed of the water would suck air bubbles in from a bunch of holes. As the bubbly water would fall down the pipe, the air would get compressed. At the bottom, the air/water froth would go into a receiver where the air would rise to the top and the water would set at the bottom and drain out through a restriction that would keep the outflow rate equal to the inflow. The compressed air was of course saturated with moisture, but compressed air always is anyway, and this system didn't need any cooler either since the air was cooled by the water. It may not have been terribly efficient, and it probably only worked at one speed ("full"), but it sure wa simple.