I cannot for the life of me understand how they work on a canal for example. Please dumb it down as much as possible
In: Engineering
Imagine there is a baby duck in your empty pool that needs to get out. Well the pool walls are too tall. So you turn on the tap and fill the pool with water until the water level raises to the top. Now the duck stays floating on the water surface so as it rises, so does the duck. Then when the pool is full, it can walk out of the water onto the side of the pool and leave.
Now the duck wants to go back to the bottom of the pool. So you he walks into the filled pool and you open a drain until the water level lowers to the bottom and the duck which is floating is lowered to the bottom of the pool
So that’s the basic idea. Now with a lock. You basically have a canal with two doors. There is an upstream part that is say 10 feet higher than the lower part, which is say at 0 feet. It is important to remember that regardless of what the lock is doing, the upstream canal is always at 10 feet, and the downsteam canal is always at 0 feet.
You close both doors. Now you let water from the upstream canal fill the space between the two doors. Now the water level between doors is at 10 feet. Opent he upstream door and a boat can float from the upstream canal to the space betwen the doors.
Once the boat is between the doors. Close the upstream door. Now let the water out from between the doors. The water will flow through a hole into the downsteam canal and the water level slowly drops to 0 feet, taking the boat with it. The water between the doors is now at the same level as the downstream canal. Open that door and let that boat leave.
Now a boat going the other direction wants to go upstream. So while the downstream door is open, the new boat drives into the space between the doors. The downstream door closes and they let water in from the upstream canal into the space between doors. Now the space fills up until it is the 10 feet, the same as the upstream canal. Now you simply open the upstream canal and the new boat drives up and away on the upstream canal.
The key is that you can always fill the space between the doors with water from the upstream canal. And you can always release water from between the doors into the downstream canal. Thus you can always raise and lower the level between doors. So it’s a water elevator. You must of course only open the downstream door when the water level is low, and you must only open the upstream door when the water level is at the upstream canal level. You can always close both doors.
There’s two different water levels
If a boat is on the high side, the lock is filled to that water level, the lock is opened, the boat enters, the lock is closed, the water is drained to the lower level, the other end opens, and the boat can continue.
If the boat is on the low side, we can do the exact same thing in reverse. The water is drained down to the lower level, it opens, the boat enters, it closes, it’s filled, so the water raises, it opens, and the boat can continue on the high side.
This can be dome with just two valves. One to drain water from the high side to the lock, and one to drain water from the lock to the low side.
You can save water with pumps or an additional reservoir, but water is always working its way to the low side every time you use the lock
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