free air compressor known as trompe, but multi-stage

I have bought some pipes to arrange into a trompe, but I don't want to dig a hole or go too high, so I wonder has anyone done a two or three stage trompe to get higher air pressure ?

I'm using the excess pressure in the tap water to run it, as I have no stream.

 

I had not seen that previously. Brian White's post is great because it nails down the circus of why one reader's test rig had low output, rather than allow people to be discouraged. He's doing well. The psi is determined by the height difference between the water output and the surface of the (still) water in the bubble separation chamber. He's closest to that. The reader was using about 1 meter difference.

The pressure I have to work with is considerable because I'm using tapwater. I don't need all that pressure which is in the water supply mains because I'll just use an elevated water tank to supply water to the house and garden after I've used up the excess pressure by making compressed air.

I have a pressure gauge on the household mains water supply, it reads a little over 75psi or just over 500kpa which is equal to 50 meters high. (50 yards high) So it could fill a tank that high, and I could use that for the input and then use a tank for the output at 5 meters high (5 yards high) to supply the used fresh water to the house and yard.

Feet of Water = PSI x 2.31
PSI = Feet of Water x .433
mH2O value = kPa value x 0.101972
1000 kpa = 101.972 meters head

It is not practical to use a tower or tunnel 50 meters high or deep, so stages must be built,

 

thanks. I think ill make a series of small tromps. The air intake for a trompe can be enclosed so that air enters via a pipe rather than straight from the atmosphere. Mixing the air and water has been made trivial in my application by those water aerators you put on household taps, especially kitchen taps. So I'm arranging a plumbing t-piece to have water enter one way through a tap aerator and air enter through the side.

The output of one trompe enters the air intake of the next, stepping air pressure up using progressively higher pressure water.


It should be possible to extract 50 meters of head, or air pressure, using a tower which is a small fraction of the height. Is this not true, if it is, perhaps an example can be found, or someone knows of one...

I should be able to make a compressor which has no moving parts except water, which uses no power except the excess pressure of the water supply, and costs no more in parts than the pipes, tanks, and their supports. It should be no higher than a little more than a water tank, and not require digging.

 

I wonder how the reduction in volume of air effects the trompes which are not open to the atmosphere, So I wonder who might have built one,

 

drawing and hypothesizing is easier than building on a budget right now, so I would think an air bubble would form in flooded airtubes if installed as drawn. the bubble extending from the lower trompe's water output level to the upper trompe's air intake. the airtube could become an alternate water path, so i guess it can loop up to the top of the tower, or above the top trompe to stop water flooding it while waiting for bubbles.

oh yes, maybe.