Options for Wind-Electric Water Pumping

[cslarson]

This particular site is for returning refugees. People who have basically been forced to return from Iran, Pakistan, India, and other places. If they are unhappy to have been placed in the middle of nowhere, to a place with zero current opportunities for livelihood, it makes them even less happy that they are to live such a different quality of life than they had in the countries they are returning from. What they want is electricity, lights for studying and the possibility of working into the evening, radios, televisions, etc. My project didn't start from the problem of how to pump water, but from how to provide electricity to rural villages. Any solution needs to be made sustainable by making it such that Afghans can provide it and maintain it for themselves. From my perspective, importing anything is done with reservation. On these wind turbines, the only part directly imported are the magnets. Everything else is available somewhere in the city.

Another advantage to the multiple dc pump route is that they can each be switched on and off depending on demand. Excess power being produced by the wind turbines can be diverted from pumping water to powering the battery bank (for lighting, etc).

[finnsawyer]

So, based on your availability statement why can't people in the city build the components needed for a wind powered, mechanically coupled, rod activated suction pump?  Then you don't even need to import the magnets.  A neighbor of mine has had a rod type pump working at 300 feet for as long as I can remember, over half a century.  Now, we're coming to the crux of the issue.  What can the locals do themselves.  Considering the level of the technology involved and your statements, I see no reason why they couldn't build the complete pump of the type I described.

[zeusmorg]

 Some of you people are making statements and not looking at the needs here, he has to pump 170m that's 557 ft, not 300 that is at the maximum depth for any rod pumping windmill, and at the depth the flow will be minimal at best. It just won't cut the needs.

 You're looking at 450 homes x 7 people in each for a total of 3150 people. How many gallons do you use in a day? A flow rate of 2 gpm ain't gonna cut it.

 Yes this is old easily sustainable technology, however have you ever built one? Or worked on one? They are complicated. I doubt you could build one from scratch the first time, make it reliable and even get 1/2 the capacity needed.

 63,000 litres/day is 43.75 litres per minute, or 11.55 gallons per minute. That's every minute, constant for 24 hrs straight, no letup in your wind.

 It's just in the past 10 years or so that dc well pumps have been able to pump a decent volume of water at this depth. Usually the solution would've been an a/c well pump to get this kind of volume.  

 I also agree that the excess electricity can be used by other sources if there's an excess generated.

 With electric windmills he can build more than needed to sustain constant operation and store excess for when the wind isn't blowing. It's also scalable, a failure in one part of the system won't shut the whole operation down.

 

[fungus]

And the change in potential energy needed for 63,000L of water up 170m is (mgh, 63000*10*170=107100000J or 29750W, 1.3kw continuous ... gonna have to be a big mill.

[fungus]

Woops, that should read 29750Whrs per day , and thats not including any inefficiencies ..

[fungus]

To extrapolate a bit more ..

Assuming the pump is 50% efficient, you'd need 59500wh/day of electricity, 2479w continous, which would need an approximately sized 35' diameter windmill at a 10mph average windspeed. Now to store power for lower wind periods, battery capacity at 1 days worth and with 80% storage and approx 70% overall efficiency, at 48v you'd need 9296Ah of battery, thats quite a few tons worth.

I might have over or under-estimated a few efficencies there but imho its pretty realistic of what to expect ..

[feral air]

Yep. I just needed to cut my post short before I got to suggesting what you did - that it could go toward a setup to do the job instead, forgetting the fuel.

What does [donating money for fuel] do about getting them self sufficient and pumping water with wind?

Nothing, directly. What it could do indirectly, is give them more time to get a better solution put together - less pressure to rush something into service. Also, if they get the wind solution up and running before the fuel runs out then maybe the generator could be used to provide some power to the homes and/or businesses for a while.

take it easy

[ghurd]

I am glad someone mentioned that.

The only real system I can see is something to suppliment the diesel system.

Maybe a windmill (less than 35'Dia), efficeint DC pump that uses a bit more than the windmill makes, reasonable batteries, and an LVD circuit.  Let it pump what it can, when it can.

Every gallon it pumps is that much less needed fuel.

Not sure of the battery cost (purchase, transport, etc).  Fuel may be cheaper if the system isn't very well planned.

Maybe Dankoff battery pumps (needing much smaller batteries) and an LVD circuit.

It would make more sense to me if there were a dollar amount to work with, and then looking at the best way to pump the most water for that amount of money.

G-

[finnsawyer]

From your numbers I calculate it would require just 1.55 horsepower to raise water from that depth at that rate.  While regular wind powered water pumpers may be limited to 300 foot depths there doesn't appear any reason why one couldn't scale up the system.  Hell, they do it all the time in the oil fields to much grater depths.  Why not a six inch diameter pump with a one meter stroke?  Yes, it would need a big mill (2kw equivalent?), but those regular water pumpers really aren't that big.  Use an adjustable beam arrangement to match the pump stroke to the turbine output.  And a diesel engine could also be fitted to such a pump.  Bottom line is we don't have all the information.  How big was the proposed diesel engine, anyway.  Great for poppy production with the excess flow?

[finnsawyer]

With the size pump I mentioned I just ran a quick calculation and found at full stroke each pumping cycle would require 1.72 minutes.  That's quite a gear down.  11.55 gallons per minute is not a very high rate of flow.

[TomW]

finn;

Good point on the motor backup for water pumper sucker rod mills. I lived in a house that had a mill that fed a tank and in no wind times you could disconnect the pump rod arm from the mill and connect it to a "pump jack" that ran off a PTO. Took a few minutes to swap but worked well.

Darned Alshiemers is kicking in, I guess or I would have mentioned it before as a hybrid option.

I am not sure I buy the 300 foot max for sucker rod pumps, either. They are positive displacement so I figured they could be pretty deep. I seem to recall one place a friend had that had a 600 foot deep well but thats long ago and I am not sure.

TomW

[RatOmeter]

" but finding a simple low frequency oscilator with a sine wave output that has excellent stabillity...."

This can be done digitally on the cheap and can be very stable. Two options off the top of my head are (1) A microcontroller either with a D-A output or interfaced to one, (2) an EPROM (or EEPROM or OTPROM, whatever is cheapest) interfaced to an D-A converter and programmed with a sine pattern. Its address bus could be driven by a counter IC with  timing from a 555-type timer.  The microcontroller approach is probably the cheapest and lowest part count option.

[finnsawyer]

Obviously, Tom, I do not know for sure what the oil people are doing.  But there are oil wells in Lower Michigan, and when one drives by and sees the oscillating beam and rod going down the well, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what is probably going on.  Anyway, they figured it all out long ago.

A lot depends for the poster what is really the most important.  A commercial diesel generator would be fine to pump water and provide electricity, but it would be expensive to operate.  I think just to pump water would probably require something along the order of a 12 horsepower diesel engine, maybe less.  Well, it's up to the poster to sort it out and do some research.

[silvereye]

ok, so this is an outside the box pipe dream,...

 but how about taking the previouse posts idea,

 and use a high volume wind water pump to pull the tube up to a height 200-300 off the well base, this brings the head 150 ft or so from the surface, then drop 4 more 2'+ tubes down the 8-10" main and check valve them all to individual wheels pumping the last 150 ft.

this would pick up the flow, and keep the cost down,

 and sure you'd have 5 mechanical mills but with a changing staff and few avalible materials the whole system could be maintained by local personel.

[spinningmagnets]

I'm curious as to the 300ish-foot limit on pumping height, I'm sure there's a simple solution if the exact problem was well-explained.

I believe the early steam engines in England were immediately very profitable by using simple sucker pumps to lift water out of coal mines that had reached down to the water table. This allowed the mining to continue to power steel production.

I forget the specific reason they had a pumping height limit, but engines on the surface would cycle a cable up and down the mine that would lift water as high as it could to a "halfway up" pool, then a second pump would lift it the rest of the way.

Perhaps its the weight of the column of water pushing back against the pumping piston seal? If so, using two or three steps to get the total rise can ease the workload on each seal.

The electric motor force (or direct mechanical wind power) can be dramatically reduced by using a simple rocking beam. The taller the column of water, the heavier it is. By adding an adjustable counterweight (water in drums?) to the other end of the beam, the weight on both ends of the beam are near equal.

A draft animal would easily be able to turn a linkage when theres no wind, or during a temporary electrical failure.

[elvin1949]

  Way back in the early 50's we had one of those

oil well type pumps on a water well.

 It was pumping from 300 ft,with only 1/4 hp.If the counter weights were set right there was no load on the water pump but for the pressure in the pressure tank.

 On at 40psi off at 60psi.Supplied water for 2 homes

half a dozen cows and a 1 acre garden.

 later

Elvin

[finnsawyer]

So, double the depth and you get 1/2 hp.  Of course, we would also need a comparison of the average flow rates, as he would be pumping more than two households equivalent.  I guess, as I said, he needs to do some research, but he could check out getting an oil well type pump for the job.  Thanks for the info.

[elvin1949]

Geom

 That was only a 2 inch well [casing].

To go deeper just add more counterweight's .

we were moving a column of water 2 in.dia. by 24 in.

long each stroke.

 Been a long time  but if i remember right it was only doing about 10 strokes a min.

later

Elvin

[finnsawyer]

I believe the pump size I mentioned would have had 13.5 times the volume of yours.  And I came up with one stroke every 1.72 minutes.  Also, he would have to pump for 24 hours a day.  His system would need to provide about three hundred 55 gallon barrels of water daily.  Do you have any idea how many yours provided?  A typical household today would use about six 55 gallon barrels daily.  The four inch well I had at my previous house tested in at 11 gallons per minute for fourteen hours.  The fourteen hours was the recommended test period for a heat pump installation.  So, eleven gallons a minute continuous for a 12 inch diameter well would not be an unreasonable output level.

[finnsawyer]

I thought I should mention that if you scale my assumed pump size down to yours you would get 7.8 strokes per minute, not 10.  I believe the difference is due to the fact that your system was pumping above atmospheric pressure by 40 to 60 psi.  This is the equivalent of adding extra height.  I assumed pumping into a holding tank at atmospheric pressure.

[elvin1949]

GeoM

 Pretty close considering i was working from memory.

later

Elvin

[Electron Skipper]

That is all well and good if you want a square or triangle wave form- but you really don't get a nice sine wave out of a 555. not without a lot of extra externals that can shift values.  

And so far as a D to A converter- MAX038 is no longer available, with no suitable replacement in the pipeline.