Patent Application
20170122343
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In his U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/734,979, filed in January, 2013, Inventor Stauffer disclosed, and applied for a patent on, the underwater bell-shaped structure that captures a bubble of air and holds it underneath the water so that the air pressure in the air underneath the bell structure will not be affected by the weight of the water above the bell structure so that any water that flows into the air bubble will not be impeded by the density of water and will fall to the water level at the bottom of the bell structure.
(1) Fields of the Invention
Siphons, water pumps, underwater air containers, air tanks, water tanks, and bell-shaped structures.
(2) Description of Related Art Including Information Disclosed Under 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98.
The science and art of siphons has been described and used for centuries. Through the creation of a vacuum in a tube, the force of gravity, and the fluid properties of water, a non-mechanical pump can be created to raise water up above the level of the surface of a body of water. For one siphon, water can be raised a maximum of 10 meters above the surface of the supplying body of water. This invention links two or more siphons together to raise water 20 meters or 200 meters or 1,000 meters, or more, above the surface level of the supplying body of water.
The science of siphons and how they work is well settled. Wikipedia has the following explanation under the word “siphon”:
The word siphon is sometimes used to refer to a wide variety of devices that involve the flow of liquids through tubes but in the narrower sense it refers specifically to a tube in an inverted U shape which causes a liquid to flow uphill, above the surface of the reservoir, without pumps, powered by the fall of the liquid as it flows down the tube under the pull of gravity, and is discharged at a level lower than the surface of the reservoir. See
In practical siphons, atmospheric pressure pushes the liquid up the tube into the region of reduced pressure at the top of the tube in the same way as a barometer, and indeed the maximum height of a siphon is the same as the height of a barometer, because they operate by the same mechanism. The reduced pressure is caused by liquid falling on the exit side.
When both ends of a siphon are at atmospheric pressure, liquid flows from high to low. However, if the lower end is pressurized, liquid can flow from low to high, as in siphon coffee. While in everyday siphons, atmospheric pressure is the driving mechanism, in specialized circumstances other mechanisms can work—in the laboratory, some siphons have been demonstrated to work in a vacuum, indicating the tensile strength of the liquid is contributing to the operation of siphons at very low pressures. Most familiar siphons have water as a fluid, though mercury is often used in experiments, and other fluids such as organic liquids or even carbon dioxide can be siphoned.
Egyptian reliefs from 1500 BC depict siphons used to extract liquids from large storage jars. There is physical evidence for the use of siphons by Greek engineers in the 3rd century BC at Pergamon. Hero of Alexandria wrote extensively about siphons in the treatise Pneumatica. In the 9th century, the Banu Musa brothers invented a double-concentric siphon, which they described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. The edition edited by Hill includes an Analysis of the double-concentric siphon. Siphons were studied further in the 17th century, in the context of suction pumps (and the recently developed vacuum pumps), particularly with an eye to understanding the maximum height of pumps (and siphons) and the apparent vacuum at the top of early barometers. This was initially explained by Galileo via the theory of horror vacui (“nature abhors a vacuum”), which dates to Aristotle, and which Galileo restated as resintenza del vacuo, but this was subsequently disproved by later workers, notably Evangellista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal.
Specifically, Pascal demonstrated that siphons work via atmospheric pressure (as Torricelli had advocated), not viahorror vacui, via the following experiment. Two beakers of mercury are placed in a large container, at different heights. The beakers are connected with a three-way tube: a regular siphon (U-shaped tube), with an additional tube extending upward from the hook in the tube: one end of the tube goes down into each beaker (as in a normal siphon), while the third end faces upward, and is open to the air. The large container is slowly filled with water (the tube remains open to the air): as water goes into the container, the weight of the water forces the mercury up into the tube (water being denser hence heavier than air)—as the water level increases, the level of mercury rises because the pressure increases—and once the mercury enters the top of the siphon, the mercury flows from the higher beaker to the lower, as in a standard siphon. As the mercury had been open to the air at all time, there was never a vacuum—it was instead the pressure of the water.
There are two main issues in the operation of a siphon:
The first issue is basic: liquid flows from the higher level to the lower level because the lower location has lower potential energy—water flows downhill. This is independent of the particular connection—liquids will also flow from higher to lower if there is a direct path (a canal), or if there is a tube that goes below the reservoirs (an “inverse” siphon), and these do not depend on siphon effect. Note that this is due to different heights (moving in the direction of gravity), not due to differences in atmospheric pressure at different heights (in fact, lower locations will, all else equal, have higher atmospheric pressure, due to a longer column of air above).
The second issue, why liquid flows up, is due primarily to atmospheric pressure (in ordinary siphons), and is the same mechanism as in suction pumps, vacuum pumps, barometers, and can be replicated in the simple experiment of placing a straw in water, capping the top, and pulling it up (leaving the bottom tip submerged).
A siphon works because gravity pulling down on the taller column of liquid causes reduced pressure at the top of the siphon (formally, hydrostatic pressure). This reduced pressure means gravity pulling down on the shorter column of liquid is not sufficient to keep the liquid stationary so it flows from the upper reservoir, up and over the top of the siphon.
In more detail, one can look at how the hydrostatic pressure varies through the siphon, considering in turn the vertical tube from the top reservoir, the vertical tube from the bottom reservoir, and the horizontal tube connecting them (assuming a U-shape). See
When the column of liquid is allowed to fall from C down to D, liquid in the upper reservoir will flow up to B and over the top. No liquid tensile strength is needed.
An occasional misunderstanding of siphons is that they rely on the tensile strength of the liquid to pull the liquid up and over the rise. While water has been found to have a great deal of tensile strength in some experiments (such as with the z-tube), and siphons in vacuum rely on such cohesion, common siphons can easily be demonstrated to need no liquid tensile strength at all to function. Furthermore, since common siphons operate at positive pressures throughout the siphon, there is no contribution from liquid tensile strength, because the molecules are actually repelling each other in order to resist the pressure, rather than pulling on each other. To demonstrate, the longer lower leg of a common siphon can be plugged at the bottom and filled almost to the crest with liquid, leaving the top and the shorter upper leg completely dry and containing only air. When the plug is removed and the liquid in the longer lower leg is allowed to fall, the liquid in the upper reservoir will then typically sweep the air bubble down and out of the tube. The apparatus will then continue to operate as a siphon. As there is no contact between the liquid on either side of the siphon at the beginning of this experiment, there can be no cohesion between the liquid molecules to pull the liquid over the rise. Another simple demonstration that liquid tensile strength isn't needed in the siphon is to simply introduce a bubble into the siphon during operation. The bubble can be large enough to entirely disconnect the liquids in the tube before and after it, defeating any liquid tensile strength, and yet if the bubble isn't too big, the siphon will continue to operate with little change.
The uphill flow of water in a siphon doesn't violate the principle of continuity because the mass of water entering the tube and flowing upwards is equal to the mass of water flowing downwards and leaving the tube. A siphon doesn't violate the principle of conservation of energy because the loss of gravitational potential energy as liquid flows from the upper reservoir to the lower reservoir equals the work done in overcoming fluid friction as the liquid flows through the tube. Once started, a siphon requires no additional energy to keep the liquid flowing up and out of the reservoir. The siphon will draw liquid out of the reservoir until the level falls below the intake, allowing air or other surrounding gas to break the siphon, or until the outlet of the siphon equals the level of the reservoir, whichever comes first.
In addition to atmospheric pressure, the density of the liquid, and gravity, the maximum height of the crest is limited by the vapor pressure of the liquid. When the pressure within the liquid drops to below the liquid's vapor pressure, tiny vapor bubbles can begin to form at the high point and the siphon effect will end. This effect depends on how efficiently the liquid can nucleate bubbles; in the absence of impurities or rough surfaces to act as easy nucleation sites for bubbles, siphons can temporarily exceed their standard maximum height during the extended time it takes bubbles to nucleate. For water at standard atmospheric pressure, the maximum siphon height is approximately 10 m (32 feet); for mercury it is 76 cm (30 inches), which is the definition of standard pressure. This equals the maximum height of a suction pump, which operates by the same principle. The ratio of heights (about 13.6) equals the ratio of densities of water and mercury (at a given temperature), since the column of water (resp. mercury) is balancing with the column of air yielding atmospheric pressure, and indeed maximum height is (neglecting vapor pressure and velocity of liquid) inversely proportional to density of liquid.
The chain model (See
There are a number of problems with the chain model of a siphon, and understanding these differences helps to explain the actual workings of siphons. The first is in practical siphons, the liquid is pushed through the siphon, not pulled. That is, under most practical circumstances, dissolved gases, vapor pressure, and (sometimes) lack of adhesion with tube walls, conspire to render the tensile strength within the liquid ineffective for siphoning. Thus, unlike a chain which has significant tensile strength, liquids usually have little tensile strength under typical siphon conditions, and therefore the liquid on the rising side cannot be pulled up, in the way the chain is pulled up on the rising side.
A related problem is that siphons have a maximum height (for water siphons at standard atmospheric pressure, about 10 meters), as this is the limit to how high atmospheric pressure will push the water, but the chain model has no such limit—or rather is instead limited by how strong the links are (above a certain height, the chain links could not support the weight of the hanging chain and the links would snap), corresponding to tensile strength of the liquid, which is not the cause of maximum height in siphons.
As depicted in
A further problem with the chain model of the siphon is that siphons work by a gradient of hydrostatic pressure within the siphon, not by absolute differences of weight on either side. The weight of liquid on the up side of the siphon can be greater than the liquid on the down side, yet the siphon can still function. See
Despite these shortcomings, in some situations siphons do function in the absence of atmospheric pressure and via tensile strength and in these situations the chain model can be instructive. Further, in other settings water transport does occur via tension, most significantly in transpiration pull in the xylem of vascular plants.
A plain tube can be used as a siphon. An external pump has to be applied to start the liquid flowing and prime the siphon. This can be a human mouth. This is sometimes done with any leak-free hose to siphon gasoline from a motor vehicle's gasoline tank to an external tank. (Siphoning gasoline by mouth often results in the accidental swallowing of gasoline, which is quite poisonous, or aspirating it into the lungs, which can cause death or lung damage). If the tube is flooded with liquid before part of the tube is raised over the intermediate high point and care is taken to keep the tube flooded while it is being raised, no pump is required. Devices sold as siphons come with a siphon pump to start the siphon process. When applying a siphon to any application it is important that the piping be as closely sized to the requirement as possible. Using piping of too great a diameter and then throttling the flow using valves or constrictive piping appears to increase the effect of previously cited concerns over gases or vapor collecting in the crest which serve to break the vacuum. Once the vacuum is reduced the siphon effect is lost.
Reducing the size of pipe used closer to requirements appears to reduce this effect and creates a more functional siphon that does not require constant re-priming and restarting. In this respect, where the requirement is to match a flow into a container with a flow out of said container (to maintain a constant level in a pond fed by a stream, for example) it would be preferable to utilize two or three smaller separate parallel pipes that can be started as required rather than attempting to use a single large pipe and attempting to throttle it.
Inventor Stauffer has previously invented (see U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/734,978 filed in January, 2013) a bundle of pipelines that deliver fresh Columbia River water from where the bottom of the Columbia River is at a high level of about 100 meters above sea level, which is found close to George (or Spokane), Washington, and then travel along the bottom of the Columbia River down to the mouth of the Columbia River, at Astoria, Oreg., and then turn south to go along the shallow Pacific Ocean coast (about 20 meters below the surface of the Ocean) and then rise up to 99 meters above sea level by going inland by travelling along the bottoms of several rivers, including the Rogue, Klamath, Sacramento, and San Joaquin Rivers to points where the bottoms of those rivers are about 99 meters above sea level, and deliver fresh water to irrigate hundreds of miles of land inland in Oregon, Washington, California, and Mexico.
The 100-meter-above-sea-level model, above, is only a conceptual model of the flow of water. If the pipelines started where the bottom of the Columbia River is 150 meters above sea level, then water could be delivered to dry lands that are 149 meters above sea level; if the pipelines started at 200 meters above sea level, then fresh water could be delivered to lands that are 199 meters above sea level—and so forth. Water can be delivered as high above sea level as a pipeline can be successfully started in the Rocky Mountains.
The perceived problem is that the probable pipelines would only deliver water to 100 meters above sea level while there are considerable dry lands above 100 meters above sea level that could benefit from fresh irrigation water. For those lands, the traditional solution is to pump the water higher with energy-consuming water pumps. This invention has the utility of lifting that water up a mountain without pumping. This invention lifts that water higher through a series of siphons that, once primed, will lift fresh water from a river bed up to plateaus where the water is needed.
Inventor Stauffer attended a high school that was on the poor side of town and, although he never siphoned (stole) gas out of the tank of a neighbors car, he had friends that claimed to have done so; they told inventor Stauffer that anyone could get gas to flow uphill, out of the gas tank on the bottom of the car, and then out the higher gas cap door down to your waiting gas can. Inventor Stauffer was skeptical that anyone could levitate gas out of a gas tank, so he experimented with siphons and found that, indeed, it could be done. He found that, if you stick a tube through the gas cap door and send it down to the gas in the gas tank, no gas will come out; however, if you then prime the gas flow by sucking on the tube (nobody should try this because it is dangerous) so that gas fills the tube, and then lower the tube so that it is below the level of the gas tank, gas will flow uphill, out the gas cap opening and down to your gas can. Inventor Stauffer has used his high school education to answer his question, “Can we get water to flow uphill to irrigate 105-meter-above-sea-level lands in need of water?”
Inventor Stauffer provides a series of siphons to raise the water. See
As explained in the “Science of Siphons” section above, the force that sucks the water up-see point A to point B, and point E to F, and point J to K in
David W. Stauffer will claim that he has invented an unlimited series of 10-meter siphons that will raise water from one level to the next by the force of gravity and the pull of siphons—see point A to point B, and point E to F, and point J to K in
The lower water output in each siphon (points D, I, and N in
MPEP 2173.05 states:
“With the passage of the 1952 Patent Act, the courts and the Board have taken the view that a rejection based on the principle of old combination is NO LONGER VALID. Claims should be considered proper so long as they comply with the provisions of 35 U.S.C. 112, second paragraph.
A rejection on the basis of old combination was based on the principle applied in Lincoln Engineering Co. v. Stewart-Warner Corp., 303 U.S. 545, 37 USPQ 1 (1938). The principle was that an inventor who made an improvement or contribution to but one element of a generally old combination, should not be able to obtain a patent on the entire combination including the new and improved element. A rejection required the citation of a single reference which broadly disclosed a combination of the claimed elements functionally cooperating in substantially the same manner to produce substantially the same results as that of the claimed combination. The case of In re Hall, 208 F.2d 370, 100 USPQ 46 (CCPA 1953) illustrates an application of this principle.
The court pointed out in In re *>Bernhart<, 417 F.2d 1395, 163 USPQ 611 (CCPA 1969) that the statutory language (particularly point out and distinctly claim) is the only proper basis for an old combination rejection, and in applying the rejection, that language determines what an applicant has a right and obligation to do. A majority opinion of the Board of Appeals held that Congress removed the underlying rationale of Lincoln Engineering in the 1952 Patent Act, and thereby effectively legislated that decision out of existence. Ex parte Barber, 187 USPQ 244 (Bd. App. 1974). Finally, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Radio Steel and Mfg. Co. v. MTD Products, Inc., 731 F.2d 840, 221 USPQ 657 (Fed. Cir. 1984), followed the *>Bernhart<case, and ruled that a claim was not invalid under Lincoln Engineering because the claim complied with the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112, second paragraph. Accordingly, a claim should not be rejected on the ground of old combination.”
At first glance, it appears that most of the improvements or new contributions of inventor Stauffer are elements of a siphon and a bell. Indeed, the science of siphons, air bubbles, and bells is well-established. Those elements are common knowledge and are the prior art of the current invention. However, it is novel to put all those elements underneath the water in a series of containers in such a manner as to raise water higher without pumping.
Inventor Stauffer claims the following as being novel aspects of those old combinations:
The Wikipedia explanation, above, discloses the unpatented common knowledge, state of the prior art on siphons. Although water is capable of flowing out of the output opening of the pipe directly into the lower level beaker, it is conceivable that some embodiments of the pipe would encounter water pressure at the lower beaker level that is greater than the pressure of air in a bubble. To avoid that pressure, Inventor Stauffer claims an open-bottom underwater air bubble structure (X, Y and Z in
Inventor Stauffer claims the following utility, as per 35 U.S.C. 101:
Inventor Stauffer's most innovative and revolutionary part of his invention is his submerged bell-shaped enclosure that holds a bubble of air so that it cannot escape and rise to the surface of the body of water in which it is sunk. The Examiner will be unable to find any prior art or any prior apparatuses that are constructed with an oxygen-containing, bell-shaped-open-at-the-bottom structure. The Examiner may be able to find submarine-like apparatuses that hold air inside a fully-enclosed structure, but he won't find any submarines with their floor cut off so that, if human beings were inside that cut-off submarine, they would be standing on, or sinking into, the ocean water below the cut-off submarine. Inventor Stauffer's open-bottom bell differs from a submarine in that Stauffer's bell is not designed to hold human beings that breathe the air in the bell. Inventor Stauffer's bell is merely a structure to capture the relatively low pressure (14.5 lbs. per square inch) of the air inside Inventor Stauffer's bell so that the water that is at the top of Inventor Stauffer's tubes will flow, after being primed, into the lower pressure of the bells and then, because water is heavier than air, fall to the bottom of the bell and mix with the other water at the bottom of the bell. Inventor Stauffer's invention works because of gravity and the water pressure difference between the top and the bottom of his underwater tube.
No other person has ever thought of a need to sink an open-bottom bell structure down into a body of water. People have fashioned diving suits with hoods that hold air so that humans can swim at lower water depths. They have invented submarines so that humans can travel under water to conduct warfare. However, no person other than Inventor Stauffer has ever thought to trap a big bubble of air that is not intended to be breathed by human beings, but rather, is intended to provide a low-pressure chamber into which water can splash and then, fall to the water at the bottom of the bell.
Like those huge elevated water tanks that cities use to elevate water so the water can run, by the force of gravity, down to all the house garden hoses in the city, Inventor Stauffer's tube, once the tube flow has been primed, will send its water down the tube and into the large bell holding the air bubble, and will flow, by the force of gravity, continuously down the tube, and into the bell of air and then fall to the water below—and the air in the bell will never be totally displaced.
Remarkably, nobody has ever thought of this serial arrangement of siphons and containers that gradually raise the level of the water-ten meters at a time. Nevertheless, it is an easily-observable scientific certainty. It will work and have the utility that Inventor Stauffer has claimed for his invention. The Examiner will engage in a futile effort if he tries to find some other example of where the invention has worked. Nobody has ever thought of it nor invented it before Inventor Stauffer. So the Examiner will not find any previous examples or patents on the invention and therefore, Inventor Stauffer is entitled to a patent on his novel and useful invention.
It is also obvious that the pressure on the top of anything standing inside the bell is only the force of gravity (14.5 lbs. per square inch). This is easily observable by looking at sailors in submarines. The only pressure the sailors feel—regardless of how deep the submarine may go—is the force of gravity or 14.5 lbs. per square inch. The sailors are protected from feeling the tremendous weight of the water above them by the roof of the submarine over their head—just like the top of Inventor Stauffer's bell protects the bubble of air from the weight of the water above it. Hence, the weight of the water above Inventor Stauffer's bell does not stop the flow of water from Stauffer's tube. Just as in the elevated tanks that city water supplies use to distribute water to city houses, water will waterfall down from the top of Stauffer's tube and then go underneath Inventor Stauffer's bell and splash into the air pocket and then fall down to be absorbed by the water at the bottom of the bell.
Inventor Stauffer knew that if he created a difference of pressure from the high pressure at the top end of his tube to the lower pressure at the bottom end of his tube, then, like a mountain river, water would flow from the top to the bottom of his tube. Inventor Stauffer conceived of the idea of using an open-bottom-end bell to create a lower-pressure chamber for the lower end of his tube and, at the same time, he used gravity and the weight of water to create the higher pressure at the top of his tube to push the water down his tube, starting at the higher end of the tube. When constructed and primed to start the flow of water, the water will continually flow from the higher pressure area to the lower pressure area. Inventor Stauffer is entitled to a patent on this novel invention.
