DeSoto Solar is leading efforts to design low-cost fluidyne engines/pumps that can be produced by local people in undeveloped areas. Everything you see here should be considered a work in progress.

Click on the images to go to the associated pages.

	UN Human Development Report 2006 Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (PDF) - This UN report details how a billion and a half people worldwide are being adversely affected by water crises. The goal of this project is to provide the technology to solve these problems.
	Going Global - The project has grown to include R&D teams on five continents. Here are photos and videos of some of the work these teams have done.
	An Invitation - If you are a creative problem-solver, we have some interesting challenges and would welcome your help! Follow this link to learn more...
	Construction of a parabolic trough prototype collector used to supply high-temperature heat for testing fluidynes.
	Black body design - A method of improving the energy absorption of concentrating solar collectors using target surface geometry.
	First Efforts - Evolution of an early 4-inch/100mm bore U-tube fluidyne engine.
	My original U-tube fluidyne pump concept.
	Two-piston shallow well pump - My first design for a pump to draw water from a 5m (shallow) well.
	Single-piston shallow well pump - A more efficient and simpler redesign of the 5m (shallow) well pump. It was at this point that I recognized a design convergence with thermoacoustic engines. This is the first of the engines I've designed that appears to offer real promise for electrical power generation.
	Pumped hydroelectric power - Thoughts on using solar-powered fluidyne pumps for hydroelectric power generation and desalination of seawater.
	Modeling fluidyne behavior - Early thoughts while building a mathematical model in software to describe/predict fluidyne behavior.
	Two fluidyne designs (one high temperature and one low-temperature) that were made obsolete by the single-piston fluidyne - included here because they were important steps toward understanding what was required. The high-temperature design uses the entire focal tube of a parabolic trough as the hot head.
	Stirling Engines and Irrigation Pumping - So many people sent me copies of this report written by Colin West for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and ORNL's PDF was so screwed up, that I've re-keyed the entire paper and corrected as many of the OCR errors as I could find. I don't think it's a very good paper, but this version is a lot easier to read (but not yet complete). This version is not in the public domain.