What I like about this design is that it's not only the grabber at the bottom, but the friction of the grain against the pipe sidewall that makes it push up the incline. By that logic, the normal force against the pipe wall would increase as the rotational speed increases due to centrifugal force increasing. Clever!,(reply>), @Alastair Dent You can put significant strain on a screw to force it to be straight, the fact that the screw is anchored and doesn't have to rotate is a major advantage of this mechanism.,(reply>), @Tuning3434 This design has some minor advantage but it is primarily a way around existing patents. At typical use-case speeds the screw must be just as stiff and supported as it does in a traditional turning-screw design; required screw stiffness of the two designs won't diverge until the speed is high enough that balance and damping of harmonics become a concern. <br>The mass is mostly irrelevent to its efficiency, it only acts as a flywheel and the bearing friction is several orders of magnitude lower than the friction losses internal to the material being elevated. In rare uses where rotational inertia matters the outer pipe has the disadvantage of a high moment of inertia(average radius of its mass is large).,(reply>), @sixstanger00 check the large clearance between screw and walls.  The material is AVOIDING the ramp and going up the wall instead. Also it keeps working with almost nothing coming in the bottom. ie not powered by scooping force.,(reply>), @blichte1 It would not work without the scoopers as it needs the initial filling of the tube. Without it you don't have walls to have friction against.,(reply>), @exp_Archive <br>Think of it this way:<br>The screw inside the cylinder serves as a "ramp." <br>The "scoops" at the bottom of the cylinder ingest particles (grain, sand, or whatever) as it rotates. As the cylinder rotates, it ingests more material, forcing the already-ingested material to be pushed further into the cylinder. Once the bottom-level material backs up in the cylinder far enough that it reaches the bottom of the screw, the material will have no choice but to start getting pushed up the "ramp." As long as the cylinder "grabs" material at the bottom, it will keep pushing the material already inside out of the way to make room. <br>Since the top-side of the screw is open, the material has somewhere to go --- <b><i>up.</i></b> <br><br>There is no actual "vertical force" being applied; only horizontal force (the dirt pushing it's way inside at the bottom). It's only because the vanes on the screw form a spiral ramp up the cylinder that material flows upward --- it's just following the path of the "ramp." <br><br>If you were to close the top, the device would eventually stop working because it would run out of free space to push material.