Nice, smart design.

I don't understand how it could be used in place of a valve with moving parts, such as the one they illustrated. The moving caps in the ground pump serve to create a vacuum to draw the water from the well up through the pump.

Tesla's valve makes it very hard for water to travel one direction, but the water's not going to climb up a valve at all without a vacuum.

Am I missing something?

@lucky760 That's a question for an engineer or someone well-versed in fluid dynamics I'm guessing but something else in place to create the vacuum would probably suffice....something that wears-out with less frequency than the valve itself perhaps?

It's rather annoying that they make such a big point to state that this design of Tesla's is much better than a traditional hand pump and even go on to state all the problems with the hand pump, but then don't even hint at how exactly Tesla's design improves on any aspect of the hand pump.

It's just basic physics. If you want to pull water up a tube from a well in the ground, some kind of suction is required. The flappy caps provide both suction and a means to holding the rising water mid-valve while pumping. The Tesla thing could not replace or improve any of that functionality as far as I can imagine.

Even if it was to replace the entire length of valve, it wouldn't help water to come up any faster and it wouldn't prevent it from going back down. So what's the point?

*Request for comment. Someone enlighten me.

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, March 13th, 2014 5:36am PDT - promote requested by lucky760.

(5:15) Build a better cocaine straw and the world will beat a path to your door...

You're trying to replace the pump with the tubes, but you only replace the valves.

Replace the two flapper-style valves int the pump with two Tesla Tubes (tm) pointing up, and you'll see what you're missing. The plunger and arm are easy to design to be almost indestructible, it's the valves that wear out and/or break with great regularity.

The wear parts of the Tesla pump design are a couple o-rings and a bushing or two.

The pump would still be there. It's just the two vavles that would be replaced. The actual piston would be (almost) the same in it's form and function.

So there would be no moving parts in the VALVES. The pump would still be a major, important moving part that would need to be serviced. But you are eliminating two points of very common failure with tesla's design.

If they were able to produce a prototype valve that was 5x to 10x the size of the one in the video, I might be interested in buying...

That is really really really cool. Videos do need audio though.

Ah, so it becomes clear.

It's the air pressure created when puling an upward-pointing Tesla valve up that draws the water up and causes only little to travel back down when the pump is pushed down. It's not a full-on vacuum, but it would cause air and water in the tube to be drawn upward.

I wonder if that would work as well as they imply. I imagine it would take more effort to draw water than with the full vacuum of a traditional pump.

Why didn't they put that into one of their fancy CGI animations? This is the worst video ever. Now I want to down-vote it.

Thanks for helping lift the fog, @Payback.

Next we want you to tackle magnetics for us.

Needs a better video. How's this different in principle from a diffuser or nozzle (really asking, don't know)?

This might work on air, because you can compress air, but I'm pretty certain it won't work on water.

Water is not a marble. It's not even millions of marbles, though that might better illustrate how it would move through the 'valve'. In reality the water is going up all those side channels AND the central 'smooth' channel all at once. The back eddies from the side channels will serve to help guide the water flowing up the main tube and if you can get ANY suction out of that sucker at all I'd be amazed.

Like I say, air is more complex. It might work there, but the efficiency would be so low I can't ever see this replacing a standard pump.

Yep. The crappy viddy illustrates the design on a molecular level and the in the finished product well, like Payback said, you got a fancy one-way cocaine straw with that one. If y'all go to the patent link site though, you'll see just how many related patents are referenced from this simple Tesla design from not a short list of *AHEM, tiny ma and pa companies like General Electric, Haliburton, Packard, Remington, Sperry-Rand, etc.
It's pretty obvious the design wasn't dismissed as useless in many applications. Tesla probably jotted this one out on a napkin while sopping some gravy at dinner while designing anti-gravity devices in his mind.

If Tesla says it works, it works!

Let's put it on the bottom of floating shoes, so that we all can walk on water!

Wow, that Tesla sure did a lot of blow.

It's fluid dynamics, so for the purposes of the model that they CFD'd and the practical experiment, it doesn't matter whether it's air or water (they both can be treated as fluids), the outcome is the same... both have temperature dependent viscosity, are subject to frictional forces, and transmit forces through pressure etc. The principle of operation won't differ, but the efficiency may.