Village Well Sweep Lab: Lever Balance and Groundwater Drawdown Blender 5.2

A traditional sweep well (zhuravel): a long log balanced on a post lifts a bucket from a log-cabin shaft, while the same pumping slowly digs a cone into the water table below. Balance the lever with stones, then watch the seasons, the recharge and the cone of depression. Drag to look around.

Presets

The sweep and the bucket

Stones in the counterweight crate

Bucket size

Pulling speed of the bucket

Pivot Sweep speed

Lever readouts

Lever graphs

Hand force on the rod over the last 40 s (down is positive); dashed: pole angle

Gravity torque on the sweep against angle: empty bucket (blue), full bucket (amber). The counterweight is balanced when the two curves lie symmetrically on either side of zero.

Aquifer and village

Hydraulic conductivity K

Saturated thickness b

Specific yield S_y

Mean depth of the water table (no pumping)

People using this well

Water use per person

Rainfall per year

Share of rain that reaches the aquifer

Catchment feeding the aquifer

Shaft depth

Water-table (unconfined) correction

Groundwater readouts

Groundwater graphs

Cone of depression: drawdown against distance from the well (log scale). Amber: this simulation now; dashed: steady Thiem solution with the same pumping.

Depth to water over the years: no pumping (dashed), in the well (solid); blue ticks: recharge. Red line: deepest depth the bucket can reach.

Water quality and contamination

Distance from the well to the source

Natural groundwater slope (hydraulic gradient)

Pathogen die-off: days per tenfold reduction (T₉₀)

Experiment: which counterweight is the easiest on the arms?

The villager draws one bucket (lower, fill, raise, pour) for each crate load from 0 to 60 kg of stones, at the current water depth and pulling speed. The effort is the root-mean-square and the peak of the hand force during the two strokes. The measured best load is compared with the analytic lever balance: the crate balances the empty bucket plus half of the water.

Independent numerical checks

View and quality

Cut away the front wall of the crib Force arrows Labels

Quality

High is the default on every device. Low lowers resolution and shadow detail (also ?q=low).

The science