This beautifully rendered solar pump is highly mobile with folding photovoltaic panels mounted on a wheeled cart. The design is stylish but scant on details. The project's creator includes a link to a similar pump-on-a-cart design in a YouTube video featuring Thomas Jenkins, an engineering technology professor at New Mexico State University. The system can pump excess water during sunny days and store some of it for use during the night or cloudy days, Jenkins says. In sunny climates it is more reliable, less costly, and requires less maintenance than common windmill pumps.
The spiral is an Archimedes' screw, which is a large screw that lifts water upward along its wide threads as it turns. In this design, the screw is a spiraling glass tube. The outside of the glass is a magnifying lens and the interior is coated with nanoscale filaments. The magnified sunlight heats the filaments, which vaporize the water. The vaporized water rises and shoots out a vent at the top of the screw, the force of which turns it. The screw then lifts water along its threads—water that can be used for irrigation. It also produces steam, which can condense into potable water in a collector or simply mist the surrounding farmland.