Effect of Source Tank Configuration on the Performance of a Hydraulic Ram Pump

Abstract

Water scarcity is one of the growing concerns in today’s world. Communities that reside in remote areas or at higher altitudes may encounter water scarcity due to lack of water transport infrastructure affecting drinking, sanitation, farming, and other water-based needs. These issues can be effectively solved by employing a hydraulic ram pump, which does not require electricity to function. Hydraulic ram pumps are powered by the water-head available between the source and the pump unit resulting in a negligible operational cost. The goal of the present study was to modify the source tank configuration of an existing ram pump system to improve its overall performance. A ram pump setup was built using various components viz. valves, PVC pipe and connectors, and digital pressure gauges. The source tank configuration was modified and experimented with using the existing ram pump unit. The study revealed a promising improvement in the overall performance of the hydraulic ram pump. Performance tests using the modified setup showed a better volumetric pump efficiency of nearly 8%. Overall, an approximately 41% increase in the pump efficiency was accomplished with the modified source tank as compared to that observed using the original source tank configuration.

Experimental and Numerical CFD Modelling of the Hydrodynamic Effects Induced by a Ram Pump Waste Valve

“…New attention was given to this old technology at the end of the century [11][12][13][14], and even more recently, due to the increased focus on sustainability and renewable energy sources [15], different studies have focused on the modelling [16,17], design [18] and performance of the ram pump [19][20][21][22][23][24]. Specifically, the authors of [21,22] studied the effects of the waste valve on the performance of the hydram.…”

Front-End Design for SiPM-Based Monolithic Neutron Double Scatter Imagers

“…SiPMs were differentially connected to a balun transformer, which passively boosts signal by a factor of two in a balanced-to-unbalanced configuration. Signals were amplified by a Minicircuits RAM-8A+ radio-frequency (RF) amplifier [14] and passed to a DRS4 evaluation board [15], where they were digitized at 5 Giga-samples per second (GSa/s). Total correlated and uncorrelated noise rate was quantified by using a "line trigger", which has no correlation with the noise events of interest.…”