We aren’t sure if [Joshua Bellamy] is serious that he wants a laminar flow to water his plants, but there are many places where having a smooth and predictable flow of water is useful or even essential. With his 3D printed adapter, you can produce laminar flow from any garden hose.
If you haven’t heard the term before, laminar flow is to water what a laser is to light. The water moves in parallel tracks with minimal mixing and turbulence. Ensuring laminar flow is often critical to precise flow metering, for example.
This isn’t [Joshua]’s first attempt. He has made a nozzle like this before, but it required a lot of assembly (“more fiddly bits than a Swedish flat-pack sofa” according to the post). Depending on the version, you’ll need various bits of extra hardware in addition to the 3D printed parts. Some versions have drop-in nuts and even an LED. Fiberglass insulation at the inlet diffuses turbulence, and some manual work on the output provided better results. When everything is working, the output of the hose should look like a glass rod, as you can see in the video below.
Air can also have laminar or non-laminar flow. Laminar air flow in a laser cutter’s air assist can make a big difference. If you don’t fancy 3D printing, you could save some drinking straws from your last few hundred trips to the local fast food emporium.
I love laminar flow water contraptions. For decades I didn’t know what the “leaping fountains” were I’d seen at EPCOT many many years prior. Garden hoses are a convenient water pump, but have long been considered insufficient pressure to generate a good fountain. I’m pleased that Joshua’s efforts have been successful.
I’ve 3D Printed my own nozzles (meant for connection to a pond pump). For what its worth, I’m not convinced that very small layer-lines are introducing significant enough turbulence to cause issues with the flow. Someone should do some research :)
There was a forum once that was quite active with folks building nozzles, but it’s upkeep and activity has fallen by the wayside. Still lots of interesting reading: https://laminar.forumotion.com/
Fountains at Burj Khalifa feature laminar-flow elements
The fountains at most malls in Sofia, Bulgaria, also feature laminar flow nozzles. The Burj Khalifa must have copied them, or the rest of the world.
I remember leaping fountains from RollerCoaster Tycoon.
This is his Mk2 version. There’s already a new Mk3 version posted now.
I wish I could still get suitable straws at my local fast food store
His mk2 (and mk3) use hexagonal “infill” for the channels, no straws needed!
It’s only 97% there, and it’s the last 3% that would make it really amazing. When laminar flow gets perfected the outside of the water is a perfectly smooth cylinder with no wobbliness. In this video the water flow is wobbling, and the further away from the nozzle, the worse it gets. I’ve seen fountains like this where the water column is so smooth, you can’t even see it’s moving at all. It just looks like a static round bar of glass, until the water hits something.
The video below is a lot closer to this ideal. (Most of the wobling is from him holding the fountain in is hand). And the video is also better made with construction details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5L6W0YoAd4
Version 3 is a big improvement. It still doesn’t look like a glass rod though.
https://www.printables.com/model/1319709-laminar-flow-garden-hose-head-mk3
I used a piece of soda can and a drill and that kind of worked. 3D printed is probably not going to create a clean shape.
The wobbliness can be attributed to a number of things. There’s a really good explanation of the math involved to generating this output here:
http://scuttlebots.com/2014/06/17/laminar-fountains-what-are-they/
Use it as optical guide to transmit information across. I wonder what effect might have the flow, its diameter and speed to the signal.
I dont know if this counts, but I take the airator screen of of the simple kitchen taps and file the threads off the spout, which is just for hand feel, but the resulting smooth (quiet) flow is nice
at the other end of the spectrum, there are simple devices that seperate air flow into hot and cold streams by inducing a very high speed rotation
through the shapes of the ducts used, reportedly very loud, and inificient, but still an interesting phenominon that has implications for all types of flow conditions
so it’s a stream of water filled with fiberglass particles.
Laminar flow is great to wash a car with. It reduces spots