Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The norias of Hama on the Orontes River in Syria ().. A noria (Arabic: ناعورة, nā‘ūra, plural نواعير nawāʿīr, from Syriac: ܢܥܘܪܐ, nā‘orā, lit. "growler") is a hydropowered scoop wheel used to lift water into a small aqueduct, either for the purpose of irrigation or to supply water to cities and villages.
A water wheel is a machine for converting the kinetic energy of flowing or falling water into useful forms of power, often in a watermill. A water wheel consists of a large wheel (usually constructed from wood or metal), with numerous blades or buckets attached to the outer rim forming the drive mechanism. Water wheels were still in commercial ...
The wheel takes one minute to complete a revolution, much longer than smaller norias. [10] To drive a wheel bearing such a weight of water, an extraordinarily long weir at a very acute angle was built to concentrate the power of the river on the base of the wheel. This arrangement can be seen clearly on satellite view maps of Hama.
In ancient Rome, the Cloaca Maxima, considered a marvel of engineering, discharged into the Tiber. Public latrines were built over the Cloaca Maxima. [32] Beginning in the Roman era a water wheel device known as a noria supplied water to aqueducts and other water distribution systems in major cities in Europe and the Middle East.
These include all three variants of the vertical water wheel as well as the horizontal water wheel. [6] Apart from its main use in grinding flour, water-power was also applied to pounding grain, [7] crushing ore, [8] sawing stones [9] and possibly fulling and bellows for iron furnaces. [10]
This system was also a stack of 16 wheels but worked like a normal overshot wheel, the wheels driving stone mills and used to grind grains. The water mills were worked from a masonry aqueduct supplying the Roman town at Arles , and the remains of the masonry mills are still visible on the ground today, unlike the underground drainage systems of ...
The Hierapolis sawmill was a water-powered stone sawmill in the Ancient Greek city of Hierapolis in Roman Asia (modern-day Turkey). Dating to the second half of the 3rd century AD, [ 2 ] the sawmill is considered the earliest known machine to combine a crank with a connecting rod to form a crank-slider mechanism .
A screw turbine at a small hydro power plant in Goryn, Poland. The Archimedean screw is an ancient invention, attributed to Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC.), and commonly used to raise water from a watercourse for irrigation purposes. In 1819 the French engineer Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier (1785–1836) suggested using the Archimedean ...