Typically the air lift is constructed from a 3 metre to 10 metre long, 10 cm diameter pipe. A controllable compressed air supply vents into the inside, lower end of the pipe. The input end is always the lower end. Compressed air is injected into the pipe in one to three second bursts with an interval long enough to let the resulting bubble to rise to the higher, output end of the pipe. The bubble moves water through the pipe sucking debris from the lower end and depositing it from the upper end of the pipe. It is often designed to be hand-operated by a diver.
Airlift pumps are used by water utilities, farmers and others to extract water from deep wells. In such cases the pipes can be 30, 60 or more meters deep underground. Airlift pumps are governed by the physics of 2 phase flow.
References
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Saturday May 31, 2008 at 11:46:13 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.