Pond Boss Forums AERATION Systems questions Aerating a Donut Dugout

I was thinking the same thing Bill, with one compressor for bottom diffusers and one compressor for what I am calling "the bubble wall" at the start of the stream.

For the bubble wall I am thinking of pouring a concrete wall at the start of the stream with a series of 4" PVC pipes going through the bottom of it. I would then attach this to a pipe PVC to create the airlift pump. I would pump in air at the bottom. Here is a rough sketch:



I've done quite a bit of research on Airlifts over the years. According to (this study) you get the best efficiency by using a regenerative blower and splitting the air across multiple pipes and injecting it at a fairly shallow depth. This study suggests that I might use the Sweetwater S45 1.2 kw regenerative blower to power 27 4" diameter airlift pumps, each getting 3 cfm at a water depth of 50 inches. It is suggested that under these conditions that each air lift could move 4,365 GPH, for a total flow of across the bubble wall of 117,000 GPH. This would give a stream with a 6.7 square foot cross section a flow of 0.66 feet per second, if my math is correct.

Balancing the airflow across 27 outlets seems a bit daunting, but I'm thinking it could be doable. One other interesting thing I found in this study suggested that flow rates only increased by 5 to 10% when injecting air through a diffuser vs just an open pipe. This should make it a bit simpler to build 27 airlift pumps, vs needing a diffuser for each one.

What do you think of this?