laminar flow
When I prepare my Travelogues, I always spend some time, usually midway through the process, looking at what's available on the Internet to support the basic observations I'm getting ready to offer. Often, for example, I'll confirm information I already have about designers or engineers or installers (and their clients), touching all the bases to get the details right. As important, I'm on the lookout for
Through all the centuries of watershape design, the laws of physics have imposed restrictions on the watershaper's ability to extend a laminar flow of sheeting water beyond a drop of five or six feet. Go much beyond that limit and the sheet breaks up, thus impairing the aesthetic effect, causing an annoying degree of splashing and generating an abundance of undesirable, monotonous noise. Those physical laws have been seriously bent in public spaces in recent times. Indeed, special weirs and nozzles have made it possible to achieve laminar flows of 12 feet or more. Up until now, the solutions employed to achieve these effects have usually been beyond the budget of smaller commercial projects or residential clients - but that's changing. At my firm, Crystal Fountains, we've long been studying the phenomenon of falling water with an eye toward maximizing the surface tension of water and thereby extending the "laminar" effect without breaking the bank. We've had the luxury of working on some high-end projects that enabled us to perform the research and development necessary to do that stretching. By adapting some of the design ideas we
As customer demands continue to push the creativity of watershapers to new limits, industry professionals need to stay atop the trends - and nudge those of us on the supplier side to new levels of creativity as well. In some cases, this means learning how to construct new environments, such as the vanishing edges and beach entrances so many clients now want. In other cases, this expanded creativity comes from a need to know what products are available from manufacturers. Although once they were the product of on-site construction skills, sheeting waterfalls now fall largely into the category of
