The self-filling siphon, and why can't it be done?

[Nabo00o]

@drspark
That is quite a useful experiment to do, you see then what it takes to both extract and condense the liquid.
I can't find the paper at this moment, but I know read an article in Alexander Frolov's magazine "New Energy Technologies" in which an experiment was described where water was first absorbed in into a type of wick, it would then because of its large surface against the air evaporate the water making small amounts of steam which would travel down to the cool side. It was cool because as the top of the unit cooled as water did evaporate, the coolness did transfer down and caused the steam to condense again and repeat its process.
It was fairly small amounts though.

[broli]

Nabo00o, I had some time going over your thread and it's quite an interesting one. There are so many promising ideas lately that aren't getting enough attention. This one seems also very easy to perform.

As for the theory, I never had a good grasp of siphons. They seemed to work in mysterious ways. I never gave the molecular bonding any thought really but your thread forced me to. It's very odd for water to pull on its neighbor for no apparent reason. The most interesting part is what wikipedia mentions at the end...

Surprisingly, experiments have indeed shown that siphons can operate in a vacuum, provided that the liquids are pure and degassed and surfaces are very clean.

So the only explanation left is that there is some sort of molecular bond that causes the flow to maintain. Their train analogy is a good one for a single tube. But it breaks apart when the tube either has a bigger volume on the outlet side or multiple paths like yours.

Nabo00o this project is very cheap.

[Cloxxki]

I recently read on a forums about a proposed setup of consecutive cilinders with aboven them vacume chambers.

I don't know if this is possible, but even if it should require a complex system of one-way valves and air-removers, it would be very significant if a single "body" of vacume could be used to continiously pump up water, any amount.

My country is for a great part situation below sea level, so I can about water pump culture and technology, and I think it's vital to come up with a low-cost scalable pump technology to irrigate the Sahara. There's enough food in the world for all of mankind, if we conquer back land lost to climate change, in part do man's own wrongdoing (over-grazing). To some extent, water in the Sahara is water not in the ocean. Saves my country raising the water defense structures further.

So, is vacume driven pumping possible?

Else, I'm breaking my head to somehow turn the proven greater mass in those shorter tubes into accumulated pressure difference over the inlet tube. Cone shape tubes, short cut connections, throwing in the power of the sun, anything goes.

[Nabo00o]

Heh, I wouldn't want to sit on that train! Even worse than a roller-coaster!
And yeah I've been thinking the same thing, too many topics here and in other forums should have been investigated by more people which aren't, especially by those who have enough credentials to actually conduct serious and good quality experiments, we need this in order to prove a point to the scientific community!

But as I've read on wikipedia   and of course on other sources, it is really quite easy to explain this phenomena. You know air right, its very easy to compress and also to expand, or at least "easy" compeered to a liquid like water and even solids like stone 

The thing is that if you have a tube filled with water and both sides point down, they can't both flow down at the same time, this would have meant that some space was left over in the tube as PURE VACUUM, which needs incredible forces to be created, it would probably even collapse the entire tube if attempted.
So instead of making this vacuum, and also because water unlike air cannot be compressed (or expanded) to any considerable degree, in a pipe it will tend to act more like a long strong string than water out in free space.

Naboo

[Nabo00o]

@Cloxxki
Well of course we can use vacuum to pump water, I think it is even the most common way to pump water on the planet! The problem is of course that once the water begins to fill the space previously being vacuum, its pressure will change and eventually reach normal atmospheric pressure. But you talked about a design which maybe didn't have these problems? Also so you know, there is a very cheap way to create a great vacuum, and it is the venturi vacuum pump. It is completely solid-state and uses the venturi-effect of accelerating liquid to create a powerful suction. If you search on youtube you can find a guy who "boils" water by creating a vacuum inside a bottle. Since the evaporation point of a liquid is decided both by its temperature and its pressure you can just as easily boil something by changing its pressure.


Btw, here's another picture. It shows that by changing the surface area and thus the volume of a pipe, it can also be used to increase the water mass flowing in it.

Edit: Also if we increase the surface-area of a pipe too much we will approach the limit to where air bubbles will enter and ruin the process, I guess that this is caused by the lack of surface tension.
Naboo