I havn’t put up a post for a few days, my excuse is that I have been formulating and researching a plan to get this project off the ground.

The Plan

I will keep going through the theory behind geometry design for centrifugal pump in my posts.I have about 10 in the pipeline outlining impeller design, casing design, power consumption, base design, testing and installation.

I had planned on building my own 3d printer, but after doing some research I don’t need to own the assetts, I should really just focus on creating and streamlining the information process.

Get solid works on my computer. Going to buy it with the fee I am charging for setting up store.diecastmania.com.au shopify store

Build and design, build and design, blog, build and deisgn. etc etc etc.

Until I get a decent post up. check out these links

Shapeways

Ponoko

MakerBot Industries

Here are some shots of a trip I did to Cambodia in 2006. They added 5 or so additional toilets connected to a sewerage pit, they had an additional 15 guys move onto the site and did not increase the size of the pit. This is what followed..

BEFORE

sewage tank on the site - rankest smell I have ever smelled

Albino roaches in the cess pit...apparently 1/17000 chance, does that mean there were 17000 cockies around

The additional toilet plan was destined to fail because they building was sunk into the earth.. so when the tank overflowed, what was the next thing that filled up

step into the poo

into the building... see the poo line about two inches high

We clean out the building with shovels, brooms and diluted the sewage with water. Tedpump would have been good for this job.

AFTER

steps are gone

filled the old "secondary" sewage pit with sand and rubble, added drainage

the finished product, no poo

Projects like this are what the tedpump is all about. Please submit your projects and stories ->steve@tedpump.com

I am about halfway through the what will be my next technical post and realised that I missed a very important factor used to help decide the impeller type.

As you will remember, I introduced the concept of head and flow, but in my excitement, I forgot to mention pump input speed. Pump input speed is the speed in revs/minute that is inputed into the rear shaft of the impeller.

When combined with head and flow, speed gives what is known as a pump curve. I quickly threw one together in paint below.

Example Pump Curve

A pump curve describes the performance, ie head, flow or speed of a pump, given any of the two other factors.

Let me interpret the above graph..The green line is speed 1, at speed 1 the pump will always give a particular head and flow. Initially, on the left hand side, while the flow is low the head is high. As the flow is increased the head decreases, for speed 1. Inside the pump as you move more mass, ie increase flow rate, you get less head, because you are always inputing the same amount of energy (speed)

If you change the input energy, speed 2, you get a similar curve and same principals apply

For now I’m not going to say much more about speed. All you need to know is that they are intimately related in pump-world.

In the previous post, we decided on at duty (head and flow) to use as a basis for our tedpump design… the duty was 15m3/hr @ 20m.

For this duty, I just picked arbitrary numbers. Interestingly, for the speed it’s not a matter of just picking a number out of the air. We need to think about what will be used to drive the pump, the availability of spare parts and the availability of electric power. Options that we take for granted in developed economies may now be available in developing economies. For example a mud brick hut in Africa will not have consistent power supply.

I’m planning a post that goes deeper into finding a drive with more details and reasons for the following choices, but for now. DC Electric Motor, 4 Poles, 50hz @ 1500rpm

Design duty for tedpump 15m3/hr @ 20m, 1500 rpm

Another example of the market I would like to design the Ted pump for

from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

here are some photos of a foot pump in africa, submitted by a ‘pump enthusiast’

to be successful, the tedpump needs to be equivalent or cheaper cost than this foot pump, be better at pumping – less effort for a better result, be able to be locally manufactured and to be powered from readily available local sources – eg car battery, solar panel, pumped hydro scheme, person pedalling on bicycle

Link Here

I like this answer!!!

15 years after the invention of the PC
by Anonymous

… it started sucking, with Microsoft and Intel dominating everything. Anyone who came out with a cool idea was given an offer they couldn’t refuse. And if they did refuse it, they were toast.

Are we on a similar suckage curve with the Internet? Although it was arguably invented in the ’70s or even before, it only came to the attention of most people in the mid ’90s.

KK: Sucking is inevitable. Suck would take over the entire universe if we did not keep inventing new things that did not suck. For a while. Even better is that the frontier of the new keeps expanding so we have more new ways to create anti-sucky coolness — even while the things we invented yesterday are starting to suck. As long was we can keep the game going, the forces of cool will outweigh the forces of suck.

I spotted this on a fish farm in Thailand after the tsunami

I was a young pup then, I literally had no idea.

This is the type of application I have in mind for the Tedpump

I spent the morning at the beach with my wife sitting in the sun and reading books together. My wife is reading a book called “The End of Charity” by Nic Frances, she has been suggesting that I read it for quite some time.

Frances writes about the importance of engaging the market in relation to social enterprises. He expands on importance of leadership within the market and placing a value on social improvement. His audience is CEO’s, political leaders and other people above my income bracket.

" it is not enough to spend 20 or 30 years contributing to the worlds
problems, then take early retirement and practise philanthropy in
order to clean up some of the mess you helped create"

I found his advice for the few with deep pockets,applicable to me. Maybe even more applicable. I say that because I have the skills to create tangible things, and create them on a social, moral and ethical basis, as well as economic/environmental.

Unfortunately I have observed that the further up the tree (corporate or political) you get the focus is on economical value only. And even if you are inclined to seek value from social, ethical and moral sources, you no longer are in a position to create tangible things, but just to talk about them. (there is  value in this, but not the same value of pumping raw sewerage out of the gutters in slum)

As I get established in my career, I want to minimize the problems that I create over its duration. I also want to have a crack at fixing some of the existing problems in the world.

That’s what this project is about, re-focus my skills from just generating economic value to generating social, moral and ethical value as well.

thats some of the plan and some of what im reading. looking forward to comments