Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Toilet, toilet, toilet, lavatory, toilet, whatever you call it, this device is indispensable because every home has at least one. But more importantly, it's a technological marvel--a fascinating water treatment system.

But it has a bad connotation in our minds, the things we do with the toilet, the bacteria associated with it, the sights we see in public bathrooms, the fact that we have to clean it--these things give the toilet an indescribable connotation, emmmm, that it feels a little dirty. In this article, we need to try to overcome the mental block and simply observe what the toilet is-it is almost the perfect solution to the problem, and the toilet is amazing.

The toilet system consists of several interrelated system components.

If you remove the tank lid and look inside, you will see all the components. The three main collaborative systems are:

bowl siphon

flushing system

reinjection system

Let us reveal the secret of the toilet from these three parts!

Bowl-shaped siphon assumes that there is a fault outside the tank, no water supply, and the toilet only bowl-shaped barrel. You still have a toilet that works. Although there are no moving parts, the bowl can solve all the problems that toilets can solve, and it can solve your needs. The key component of the toilet is called siphon structure, as shown in the following figure:

You can perform two experiments on the toilet to understand how the siphon works. First, take a glass of water and pour it into the toilet. You will find that almost nothing happens. More interestingly, you can pour 25 cups (6 liters) of water into the toilet cup by cup and still nothing happens. This means that no matter how many cups of water you pour, the water level in the toilet will not rise. You can see in the picture why this is so: when you pour the water from the cup, the water level in the toilet rises, but the excess water immediately overflows the siphon and runs away.

Now, take a bucket of water--about seven or eight liters--and pour it into the toilet. You'll find that the water will flush the toilet clean. That is to say, almost all the water is sucked out of the toilet, making a loud "flush" sound, and all the water flows down the pipe. Here's how it works: water fills the toilet quickly, and once the siphon is full, the rest is left to the automatic siphon effect. Water is siphoned out of the toilet and flows down the pipe. Once the toilet is empty, air enters the siphon, making a distinctive cooing sound, after which the siphoning process stops.

What you can find is that even if the bathroom is without water, you can still flush the toilet, all you need is a tank with a few liters of water.

The flushing system tank functions similarly to the bucket described in the previous section. To activate the siphon mechanism requires enough water to flow quickly enough into the toilet, which is not possible with household pipes, in which case the siphon will not be activated. Therefore, the tank can act as a container, which can hold a few liters of water, which is the amount of water that takes 30 to 60 seconds for the water pipe to accumulate. When the flush button is pressed, all the water in the tank enters the toilet in about three seconds, equivalent to pouring a bucket of water into the toilet.

A flush handle is located on the side of the tank. When the handle is turned, it pulls the trigger lever attached to the flush valve. The actuating lever lifts the flush valve and then floats it to one side, exposing a drain hole about six centimeters in diameter. Opening this hole allows water to enter the toilet bowl. In most toilets, there are holes in the rim of the bowl through which some of the water drains, while most of the water goes to a large hole in the bottom of the toilet. This hole is called a jet siphon, and it drains most of the water directly into the siphon. Because all the water in the tank enters the toilet in about three seconds, this is enough to fill the siphon and activate the siphon effect, so both water and waste in the toilet can be sucked out.

Refill system Therefore, as long as we pour enough water into the toilet to activate the siphon, the toilet will be flushed clean. The function of the tank and flush valve is to quickly pour about 7 liters of water into the toilet. After the tank is emptied, the flush valve at the bottom of the tank will cover the drain hole and refill the tank with water. The refill system refills the tank with enough water to start the whole process again.

The refilling system has a valve that opens and closes the water supply. When the tank float (or float) drops due to a lower water level, the water valve opens and the fill valve (or refill valve) supplies water in both directions.

Some water runs down the fill pipe and begins to refill the tank. The rest flows through the toilet fill pipe, then down the overflow pipe into the bucket, slowly refilling the bucket. As the water level in the tank rises, so does the float. Eventually, the float rises high enough to close the valve. But what happens if the float falls off, or if the fill valve gets clogged and can't close? Theoretically, the tank would overflow and flood the bathroom. But the overflow pipe is designed to prevent this from happening, directing excess water to the bucket rather than to the floor.

After understanding the composition of each part of the toilet, you can know its overall structure:

Push the handle to pull the trigger lever, thereby opening the flush valve.

In about three seconds, about seven liters of water flush from the tank into the bucket, and then the flush valve reseals.

The current activated a siphon in the bucket, which sucked the contents of the bucket down the drain.

At the same time, when the water level in the tank drops, the float will also drop, and the falling float will open the fill valve.

Water flowing through the fill valve refills the tank and bucket. When the tank is refilled, the float rises, and when the water level reaches the desired level, the fill valve closes.

The overflow tube prevents water from overflowing if a problem occurs and causes the fill valve to operate all the time.

The problem with using this method on an airplane (or train, bus, ship, etc.) is that you can't use a toilet full of water on a moving vehicle-every little vibration makes water splash, and therefore the siphon structure can't be used in this case.

Airplane toilets use active vacuum drainage rather than passive siphon, so they are called vacuum toilets. When you flush, it opens a valve in the sewer, and the vacuum in the pipe sucks waste out of the toilet and into the container. Because vacuum does all the work, it takes very little water (or blue disinfectant used on airplanes) to clean the toilet for the next person. Most vacuum systems use only 2 liters or less of liquid for flushing, while water-saving toilets require 6 liters, compared with 19 liters for older toilets.

It turns out that even when used as everyday furniture, vacuum toilets have many advantages:

They save water;

They can use sewer pipes of much smaller diameter;

They can be flushed in any direction, including upward, and since vacuum systems do not use gravity to move water, sewer pipes can move directly upward;

The pipes don't have to go down also means you don't have to cut the floor when installing a new toilet;

They can be placed anywhere in the building.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ID: cas-iop), author: Marshall Brain, translation: Nuor

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