Last Tuesday, WSU sent out a press release stating that Randy Hurd, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the university, had been part of a team that had helped create two urinal designs — named the Cornucopia and the Nautilus — that reduced “splashback” to 1.4% of traditional models of urinals.

“Hurd worked with a WSU student and a team from University of Waterloo in Canada on the research,” the release said. “Their results were recently published in PNAS Nexus, a peer-reviewed journal by the National Academy of Sciences.”

On Friday, Hurd spoke with the Standard-Examiner about how the idea came about and the process to design a better urinal.

Fluid mechanics

Hurd said the idea’s origins trace all the way back to 2012 when he and Zhao Pan — one of the other authors on the study — were graduate students at the same lab.

“We went to a big conference which we thought was interesting,” Hurd said. “We heard some really cutting-edge presentations about interesting things happening in our field, which was fluid mechanics. … We were really excited about it, but one thing we kind of thought about is really interesting finds or breakthroughs couldn’t be easily communicated to the average person. You almost needed to take a class or two before it even made sense or before you could understand what was so significant about the finding.”

He said he and Pan thought it would be fun to do something for the practical person.

“As we were joking and brainstorming for that, somehow, the idea of urinals came up,” Hurd said. “We said, ‘Have you ever used a urinal, you’re wearing sandals or something and you feel that splatter come back on you?’ Someone could say, ‘Well, you’re not using it right.’ Our thought was, ‘Why do you have to use it right? Why do you have to be so aware? Can’t you just make it so I can use it and there’s no ill-effects?'”

Hurd said this led to a few conference presentations that proved to be rather popular.

“Typically, when you go to these scientific symposiums, you have about five or six people listening to you,” he said. “When we went to present on urinals, it was a full house — probably around 100 people packed into this tiny room.”

‘Why don’t you make the urinal work right?’

And for years, they thought it would stick to being a paper they’d presented.

But time makes fools of us all.

“A few years later, I found myself here as a professor at Weber State, Zhao Pan is a professor at the University of Waterloo and we met up and we were talking about our old work,” Hurd said. “Zhao had this idea of, ‘What if we take this finding you had, Randy, about how there’s an angle where splash is suppressed? I think I can solve this mathematically so we can come up with a surface where you would never get any splashing.'”

Hurd said while the idea may seem trivial to some, there’s really a few practical justifications to design urinals that reduce splashback.

“Just about every urinal you go to has something in it to prevent splashing,” he said. “I would argue that companies are spending hundreds of dollars every year to put these devices in urinals. I’m sure you don’t want to be constantly spending money on something you have to replace and put in the urinals. It kind of begs the question, ‘Why don’t you make the urinal work right?'”

He said over about a year of research, the teams found out at what angles the amount of splatter drops off by testing equivalent streams of water.

Then came the hard part.

“Prototyping was tricky,” Hurd said. “We tried a lot of methods — 3D printing seemed like a good one but it’s actually hard to get anything to scale — so we had to do some back garage kind of methods to replicate these surfaces accurately.”

He said they made one prototype of each design to test out.

“We brought in the urine streams again, sprayed them against these and against regular urinals and we would typically would use some method where we would capture those splattered droplets and we would measure the mass of what had been splattered,” he said.

Hurd said the results were telling, especially compared to urinals that may be used in a busy setting.

“Normal urinals only splatter about 1% of the urine on the floor,” he said. “The logical conclusion is 100 people use the toilet, that’s like (one full) urination on the floor, which is pretty easy to get to in an airport or something like that. Regular toilets are OK, but when they’re used a lot, this becomes a problem, but then only 1% of the volume splattered out and we’re down to less than 2% of the amount they do.”

He said the designs work well because of their geometry.

“As long as the user isn’t doing anything weird like climbing on top of it or standing on their hands — assuming the user stands in that kind of accepted position, it’s impossible for them to produce a stream that impacts that surface at a bad angle,” he said. “There’s almost a part of us that wanted it to be more complicated, but we also love that the solution is so easy.”

Patents pending

While Hurd and company produced two prototypes that seemed to nearly eliminate splashback, that doesn’t mean the future of urinals are about to appear in a men’s bathroom near you soon.

“We presented about this about a year ago and that was the first time these designs ever saw the light of day,” Hurd said. “It hasn’t been very long that these have been known about and not that many people went to that presentation. The final paper came out just last month and we filed a patent, but of course, we didn’t make a big announcement when we filed the patent.”

The patents for the designs are still pending and no formal manufacturing has taken place on either of the two designs and Hurd said they have no plans to start their own manufacturing company.

And with the work done utilizing Weber State University resources, Hurd said further steps will be up to the university.

“Because we work with Weber State, they own a portion of the actual property, so that’s kind of their task to interface the companies and look for interest,” he said. “You would think we would be doing it, but me and Zhao as professors, we’re mostly interested in the next research question and teaching our classes and things like that.”

He said it was ultimately fun to discover a solution to an issue that no one else, to their knowledge, was actively searching for.

“No one’s done it before,” he said. “It’s kind of fun that’s so straightforward. It’s like when they started making the ketchup bottles with the opening on the bottom. Getting ketchup out of the bottom has always been a problem, but nobody ever solved it. It’s kind of fun to come up with a simple solution.”