More solar stuff...

The only woodworking in this project is in the parabolic solar trough that sucks up the heat, but for those wreckers who've been following my efforts to use the best of hi-tech to produce ultra lo-tech solar devices, this might be interesting...

A group in Mendoza, Argentina saw my fluidyne web pages and has decided to give the solar pump a try. Mendoza Province is arid, but there's underground run-off from the Andes at a depth of 5 m. You can get a quick satellite view of the area at

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see the no-fuel, no-electricity pump design at

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us luck!

Reply to
Morris Dovey
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You are covered.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

Wishing you a lot more than luck, Morris.

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Morris Dovey wrote in news:ha8pp2$d6i$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

Go for it Morris, and good luck to the Argentinos (spelling?)!!

Reply to
Han

Reply to
Robatoy

Thanks! The high level Google satellite view doesn't show conditions very well (much too green) - you can get a better idea of what they're dealing with by zooming down anywhere.

When the folks in Mendoza told me it was a big wine-producing area, I took one look and quipped back that it looked about perfect for growing raisins. :)

More than luck? Well, _water_ would be good. Methinks they need a few apple and peach orchards; and if they have wine and apples, then they'll need alfalfa to support cheese production...

...and, of course, they'll need to grow trees for the woodworkers. ;->

Plus - if we can get this thing working, there's a team already forming in Khartoum who'll be able to put it to work immediately to expand the arable area on either side of the Nile.

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Heh - not sure about noble causes, but it's fun! If it succeeds, it'll be because the kids down there are all more qualified to bring this off than I. It's always somehow reassuring for me to (re)discover that there are smart people everywhere. :)

A 5m (about 16-1/2 feet) deep well should be a slam-dunk - but I'm hoping that everyone involved learns enough that we can put our heads together to design a 10m solution. /That/ probably won't be so easy, but it's an important next step...

By the end of this year it looks like there'll be six teams spread over five continents - a major improvement over one old duffer tinkering by himself in a drafty aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere.

Many hands make light work.

[ No apologies for the pun :-D ]
Reply to
Morris Dovey

You could do miracles with that in Africa.

Best of luck and kudos in the venture.

I hope you make a ton of money and help a lot of people.

Reply to
-MIKE-

Thanks! I'll guess that your spelling is correct. Beside butchering English, I can make myself misunderstood equally badly in French and Portuguese - mas no hablo. Fortunately, the Argentine engineering students seem to consider learning English an essential part of their technical education, and that's made it easy for me.

( Hmm - I have a nephew who works at Rosetta Stone, I wonder if he can get me a good deal on a Spanish course... )

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Go, Morris.

If you can keep the guvmint and politicos out of it (as the Crazy Horse Memorial folks claim they have), things will probably work out.

You are a gift!

- Doug

Reply to
Doug Winterburn

Thanks! Encouragement can be a powerful force, and I'll pass it along. I've been tickled with where and by whom the work is being done. Team Pakistan was a small group of engineering students who sometimes worked to the sound of nearby gunfire, Team Sudan is headed by a Brit physicist who, with his MD wife, decided that they could make [and, in fact, are making] the world a better place by taking what they knew and sharing it with the folks of the Sudan. I got an e-mail Friday from Park Falls, Kentucky - an eleventh grader who has her first fluidyne running and now wants to pursue optimization - who (if parents and teachers approve) will be the start of Team USA.

I'm tickled because, although some serious players (NASA, CERN, Harvard, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Oxford, Cambridge,...) have been watching the web site, they've not been contributors. The progress has /all/ come from places and people who couldn't possibly have been predicted...

...and I'm loving every bit of it. :)

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Ooooh - I hope so! According to the UN, there are about a billion (a thousand million) people with a /severe/ water supply problem. A lot (but nowhere near all) of them are in Africa.

Thanks. I'll pass those along to the folks who're doing the real work.

Alas! There's no profit in this project. All involved are unpaid volunteers who've agreed to put everything learned about making these things into the public domain. The goal is to come up with a design that can be produced inexpensively everywhere by anyone with only simple tools.

There's no shortage of challenges, but as more people have become involved, the pace of development has picked up considerably.

Reply to
Morris Dovey

:)

I think the politicos will continue to watchfully ignore all of this, since it isn't likely to produce campaign contributions - but may provide something for which they can claim credit when the work is done. :)

Heh - actually I've been more what Robatoy (in one of his more polished moments) might call a paddlemaster - almost an /agent/ /provocateur/. :)

Reply to
Morris Dovey

That's wonderful.

I'm involved with a couple organizations that provide aid and training and other things to Africa. One is called the "Mocha Club," because they focus on how much only $7 (two mochas) a month can do for families and communities.

For example...

  • SUSTAIN life for 1 person living with AIDS.
  • PROVIDE clean water to 7 Africans for 1 year.
  • SAVE 1 person's life from malaria.

Amazing.

Reply to
-MIKE-

That's freakin' awesome.

How can we contribute to the effort?

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Wow, you caught me flat-footed on that one - but I can think of a number of needs:

[1] There isn't yet a non-electrical tracking system to keep a trough steadily aimed at the sun. A polar mount like that used for satellite dishes (rotate trough on long axis to track the sun during the day, and elevation +/-23.5° seasonal adjustment) might be ideal. I've been trying to figure out a hydraulic solution, but I'm sure there's more than one way to skin this cat. Whatever the solution is, it'll need to keep the trough steady in even gusty conditions. [2] The next developmental stage will be wells deeper than the 27 feet or so that water can be sucked without pulling a vacuum. I identified the problem, stuck a post-it on the wall, and moved on. If there's a pump guru somewhere who can figure out how to use the fluidyne's alternating pressures to do that job, there's a real opportunity to be a hero by showing how to do it. My best guess was to use two pumps - one at the bottom of the well to pump the water, and another at the surface to pump hot air down to drive the water pump. I think there might be a better way, but I don't know what it might be. [3] There's a need for a /really/ inexpensive, long-lasting check valve. A DIY solution might be ideal but isn't required. It needs to open easily (as in not using up pumping power to overcome spring force or weight of the moving part) and seal completely on closure. The PVC check valves that I was able to buy locally are expensive ($22/ea) and don't seal well at all. [4] /Major/ good karma would accrue to anyone who could provide development teams with pressure, temperature, and fluid piston displacement information for both hot and cold heads at a one kHz or so sampling rate for display on a PC or laptop with via, say, a USB2 interface. One of the biggest headaches is that we can't see what's going on inside the engine. There's a commercial opportunity here, too - because once the developers are done, a tool like this would be needed for maintainers to trouble-shoot failing pumps. [5] Fluidynes operate on the temperature differential between the hot and cold heads, and we'll probably always be looking for ways to more effectively get heat into the hot head and out of the cold head without significantly affecting the cost or requiring custom parts. [6] There'll also be a "forever" search for better/less expensive materials throughout. I've thought about casting ceramic/concrete pump bodies and daydreamed about molded one-piece high-temperature plastic pump bodies, but don't know enough materials to even be dangerous. I found out the hard way that PVC doesn't much like to be heated above the boiling temperature of water (it wasn't very pretty when I tried that).

And the last item for tonight (I'm about to fall asleep at my keyboard) is:

[7] A battery/solar powered electronic device (preferably hand-held) that tells if and how far down there's enough water to justify a well and pump. It'd also be a big help to know if there are any solid obstacles (like boulders) between the device and the water.

Probably I should put this list on a project web page. Tomorrow.

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Argentines. And don't mistake them for Bolivians.

JP

Reply to
Jay Pique

....other than a human with a wrench and a few instructions!

JP

************** Kiss. : o

PS - I made some clamping cauls!!!! They're excellent!

Reply to
Jay Pique

Morris Dovey wrote in news:ha964l$pnp$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

And so am I, Morris!

I am also impressed by the way the Heifer organisation (heifer.org)provides aid to developing countries. Have you contacted them by any chance? -- Best regards Han email address is invalid

Reply to
Han

Morris Dovey wrote in news:ha9813$rei$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

An agent provocateur isn't bad. As long as he gets people provoked to do the /right/ thing. And you seem to be such a person!

Reply to
Han

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