Big try at gravity wheel

[minnie]

  Mark,
          thank you for answering my question. I can now see the point of simplifying
things and this makes it much easier to calculate what is actually going on.
   I'm a semi retired old farmer and have been intrigued with this since Mark Dansie
  started taking it seriously.
    I do appreciate the efforts you scientists put in to explaining things. Who would
   have thought such a simple device as could have been so difficult to analyse?
             John.

[MarkE]

Minnie it is my pleasure.  Buoyancy for some reason plays with people's intuition.  It doesn't help when some people go very far out of their way to misrepresent things as happened in those five aquarium videos and much discussion that followed.  The reality is actually dirt simple as explained by Archimedes' Priniciple:

Immersing anything in a fluid subjects that object to an offsetting buoyant force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid volume. 

When something has a lower density than the fluid, we have to do work to submerge that thing.  We are lifting fluid while sinking the thing.  When something has a higher density, we have to do work to lift it.  The fluid that falls as we lift the thing has less mass than we lift.  If the density of the thing is the same as the surrounding fluid, then the thing can move around in the fluid without expenditure or gain of potential energy to the system because if we go up a like mass of surrounding fluid falls, or if we go down a like mass of surrounding fluid goes up. 

What all of this adds up to is that buoyancy doesn't change the behavior of gravity:  The net weight lifted or dropped is just the original object weight offset by the weight of the displaced fluid mass that would occupy the object's volume.  We do relatively less work going up and relatively more work going down.  At the end of the day we are still lifting and dropping the net masses in a gravitational field.  Our combined experience is that gravity is conservative:  If we take a test weight from some starting point through an arbitrary path in a gravitational field, as long as we and come back to where we started we neither gain nor lose gravitational potential energy.  For all of the demonstrations, protests, and various hand waving by:  Red_Sunset, Tom Miller, Wayne Travis, etc. none have shown that HER or anyone else can coax gravity into non-conservative behavior.

[MarkE]

I started by just having the vents at the top connected together with a simple transfer pump between them.  I actually built other testbeds many years ago using this setup so it was easy for me to think about and understand how it worked.

A weight that is removed is how I went about it, I did not bring in the PE change of the water in the outside big container, since that volume after the setup stays the same and since the cylinders are not interacting with the surface that subtle change in pressure should have no impact.

I learn faster by doing, hands on, so most of the things I get up to I try and use things I have done as parts of the build or concept.

Webby, so what would you like to do for work here?  If you want to count weight that can be raised going from the starting condition to state 2, I am good with that.  We can stipulate that the water container is so large that the water level change is incidental.  Does that work for you?

[minnie]

  Hi,
     trouble is, if you simplify everything down, unless you add some form of
energy, you end up with a pail of water!
                         John.
ETA in this country we've got that much water that a rail line that's lasted
150 years has been washed into the sea.

[Red_Sunset]

.....................................................
..................................For all of the demonstrations, protests, and various hand waving by:  Red_Sunset, Tom Miller, Wayne Travis, etc. none have shown that HER or anyone else can coax gravity into non-conservative behavior.

MarkE,

A perfect faultless explanation of buoyancy !   the previous demonstrations, protests, and various hand waving were not DISPUTING  anything you said as incorrect, it was incomplete for not being the whole possible story.
But it nevertheless is an other angle of approach to analyze the process and it should lead to the same conclusions, except the view might not be as intuitive as provided using area and pressure with height displacement.

That Red_Sunset, Tom Miller, Wayne Travis, coax gravity into a non-conservative behavior is a misnomer !  That reveals a lack of understanding.  If seen indirectly, yes this could be understood that way, but if looking closely into the process flow, this is definitely not what happens. The device responds to the natural gravitation as expected according to the condition the device is in without abnormality.

Lets stay within the boundaries of reality. 
Red_Sunset