This system is designed to harvest water from October to May of each year. All units used in the River Recycler system at the collection site are temporary, are submergible, or they are floating. As some mouths of the river will change each year, the position of the recycler intake will need to adapt to these changes. The position of the Reservoir Connection Sites (RCS) would be permanent and marked with lighted buoys. Temporary Recycler equipment would be moved back to the RCS points each season during low river flows and high river use by the public during the summer months. The water lines from the RCS to the reservoir are all permanent.
Water lines are in water depths less than 3,000ft and will be suspended within 100ft of the seafloor. In depths less than 1,000ft, the waterlines will be suspended within 20ft of the bottom. From the location of all RCS, the waterlines will be suspended 10ft above the bottom.
Floating curtains will direct a portion of the rivers discharge toward a floating water blanket. The weighted curtain follows the contour of the sea floor suspended at least three feet above the bottom. The water blanket is filled with a 55/45% mix of salt and freshwater. This solution allows the water blanket to float on saltwater and sink under freshwater. As the freshwater flows onto the water blanket, it becomes separated from the salt water by this water blanket.
After water is collected and filtered, it reaches the accelerator paddle wheel-style pump designed to pump large amounts of shallow water. The design of the intake will work by gravity but will recycle more water even faster with the pump.
Once the water has been accelerated, it enters the high pressure wave energy injection pump. This pump sends the water into the TD Waterline This wave energy pump is designed to generate electricity in conjunction with pumping water. The wave energy pump uses piston and cylinder system with storage compartments for compressed air.
The fresh water travels through the submerged floating waterline to the inverted floating water reservoir. This reservoir uses the same physics of freshwater floating on saltwater as used to collect the freshwater in the first place. It has a large doughnut shaped floating platform.
Balls filled with a half and half mixture of saltwater and freshwater are used as a density interface as well as a self-cleaning screen system. The balls float on saltwater but sink in freshwater, defining the boundary between them. Also, as sediment collects on the top of the balls, the weighted ball will roll over, allowing the sediment to pass through the mesh below.
The water balls have one more purpose. When the reservoir is empty, the balls are on the surface. The filling process involves a vinyl blanket placed on top of the water balls. This keeps disturbances on the surface of the reservoir from mixing fresh with salt water. Once the depth of the freshwater is deeper than 20ft, the vinyl blanket is no longer necessary to separate the fresh and saltwater. The blanket will be pulled up once this depth is achieved, leaving the balls suspended as the barrier between fresh and saltwater.
1 trillion gallons being held in reservoirs sounds like a lot, but the Klamath River alone pours 3,600,200,000,000 gallons of freshwater into the ocean every year. By comparison, we are skimming a very small portion of that freshwater from the surface of the ocean.