How to lift water up to 5 metres without using a pump?

[BobPixel]

Offer a $1000 to the first person to demonstrate their technique.

 

[Shafia Zahin]

What do you mean by "pump"?
Do you mean an actual motor pump or the principal of a pump?

 

[arydberg]

Go the the Bay of Fundy and wait for the tide to come in.

 

[anorlunda]

I count 45 unique answers so far. I wager that PF members could come up with many more.

My favorite so far was this one, which is so subtle and clever that I didn't get it at first glance.

Easier to just invert your coordinate system.

In other words, if we invert the definitions of "up" and "down", than water always runs uphill.

 

[jedishrfu]

Change the direction of gravity by bringing the Earth closer to a more extremely massive cold body as evaporating has already been mentioned.

Attach the container to the ground and quickly accelerate the ground downward.

Don't do anything and tell the professor it will happen, you just have to wait a bit.

 

[jbriggs444]

You could pour the water into the Mississippi in Saint Paul, and wait for it to flow down past New Orleans. In the course of this flow, it will have moved farther away from the center of the Earth by significantly more than five meters. But the approach of spinning the container has already been mentioned, so this hardly counts as original.

 

[anorlunda]

Deep water in the ocean will rise naturally due to thermal or salinity unbalances.

 

[EnumaElish]

Just add (more) water

 

[Shafia Zahin]

Add some solids or liquids to the water which have a higher relative density than the water.

 

[Yo da dab]

I was asked how you can lift the water up to 5 meter but you are not allowed to use any kind of pump. What I thought; seal the container from where water is being lifted. Connect it with a pressure vessel at some height which is containing steam and water with valve in between them. By default valve is closed. Now wait for steam being cooled in the vessel that would create a vacuum inside the vessel. Then open the valve. One more thing vessel is kind of cylinder and Kind or cover is placed at top of inside the vessel which will go down during cooling of steam; so that I would be able to make vacuum that is effective as I am stopping any kind of evaporation or boiling. There is a provision of tap below vessel to drain out some water also. After all these things I ended with a reciprocating pump only.

Please help

assuming you have cold and warm/hot water to an enough extreme you can push them towards each other in a cylinder with warm under cold. make sure the pipes are possitioned so that the water rides the outside of the cylinder and the water goes the same direction do to the circle. have an overflow at the top so the water that comes out is 5 meters high . the effect is a tornado of water that overflows into a channel that is effectively 5 meters high

 

[Salvador]

take the moon or any other large mass body you can find and attach a rope to it.Then use the rope to hold it in place right above your water source and if needed use the rope to pull the moon closer and your water will go upwards.

Otherwise I would put an empty tank with an open top the +5 meters and wait for rain.

 

[johnnyrev]

It depends on the volume of water you need to lift, the number of time cycles you can lift the water in, whether these cycles constitute a pump, and so forth. Does "pump" mean moving parts? You can create a solar "pump" without having any moving parts except for gate valves, maybe a check valve. If this is an exercise, saying the system can remain closed, and the lifted water doesn't have to be utilized, it simplifies things even more. I am limited as to what image edit software I have available, but here goes:

The water is contained in the bucket at the bottom. The top has a chamber that is sealed to the standpipe, with the top of the standpipe above the bottom of the chamber to allow for catchment of overflow. With a limited diameter not as much vacuum will be necessary to lift the water based on mmHg/in², but this will increase the amount of cycle times required.

Paint the upper chamber black. During the day, the upper chamber will heat, forcing air out and bubbling out through the bottom of the standpipe. In the evening, the air will contract, atmospheric pressure will force water up the standpipe to be collected in the catchment basin, provided the difference in heat is great enough to differ with ambient air temperature.

EDIT: If you need to collect the water from the catchment basin for use, I'm sure you can figure out from here how to add the gate valves to ensure vacuum loss isn't created, etc.

 

[Fervent Freyja]

Another idea: have toddlers step on and or try to plug all the nozzles at your nearest splash pad. Some of those nozzles can build enough pressure to 'lift water' much further than 5 meters!

 

[johnnyrev]

I think OP was asking for real help. But on the fun side, might I suggest diamagnetic levitation?