Today’s invention is a nonlinear fluid control valve (This may not be new, but I haven’t seen it before and I dreamt it up when pouring water into a kitchen colander).
A vessel has holes at the bottom and is placed on a smooth, flat surface.
A fluid is poured into the top. If the inflow is more than the outflow through the holes, the level rises and the pressure exerted by the vessel base on the surface increases.
At some point, the depth in the vessel is great enough to stop the outflow entirely.
This mechanism might be used, with a tall vessel, as a cut off valve, which activates only after a particular level of fluid has been exceeded in a feed tank (for when a system is trying to dispense only a given amount of some liquid).
