Application profile: The motors, pumps, and

valves that make water dance

Designers are using engineering in the service of art, creating crowdpleasing fountains and soothing waterscapes.
Jan 9, 2003Stephen Mraz | Machine Design

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When the 18th century Somerset House on England's Thames River was recently
refurbished, architects turned an open space that had become a parking lot into a lively
fountain of 55 water jets. At night, jets can be individually illuminated in one of 28 different
colors thanks to fiber-optic technology and colored filter wheels.

To most people, water is for drinking, washing, and keeping their lawns green.
To others, such as surfers, skiers, and snowboarders, it is a playground. But to
a relatively small group of designers, water is the medium they sculpt and
manipulate into fantastic fountains that are dynamic works of art.

Those seemingly simple fountains, however are built on a solid

foundation of hydraulic engineering, state-of-the-art pumps, piping,
compressors, and, in some cases, patented technologies on par with the
most advanced aspects of rocket science.

From the simple . . .

Some fountains use a single type of hydraulic device, one that generates
vertical plumes. Designers then rely on repetition, geometry, and
creative lighting to bring it to life. Somerset House in London, for
example, was recently transformed from government offices into an Arts
Centre. As part of the project, architects from Donald Insall Assoc.,
turned a one-time parking lot into an interactive fountain, a 53x11 grid of
water jets set in 45,000 Portuguese granite paving stones. Each of the 11
rows has a dedicated water pump that puts out up to 140 gpm (28
gpm/jet) enough to let each jet climb 16.5 ft into the air.

Designers build PVC mock-ups of water effects and test them in a tank at Show Fountains
headquarters in Springs, Tex.

Jets are set about 10 ft apart, far enough that on calm days, pedestrians can
thread their way through and only get the bottom of their shoes wet. But on
windy days, it can be a different and slightly soggy story.

Water is reclaimed and recirculated by a drainage canal surrounding the

fountain. It sends water into a 9,500-gallon holding tank where it is
filtered, treated with ozone and chlorine, and reused. Typically less than
1% of the water is lost to wind and evaporation on any given day.
Nozzles are set in 6-in.-sq steel plates flush with the pavers. Four fiberoptic lenses surround each jet, and a group of 22 projectors send light to
the fountainhead lenses. (Each projector feeds 10 fiber-optic cables.)
Two colored gel-wheel filters on each projector combine to illuminate the
jets with a choice of 28 possible hues. Using fiber optics and remotecontrolled jets means no electrical power is sent to the fountainheads.
During the summer, a programmed show coordinates lighting and the
jets' heights, creating rows of waves, and geometric and random shapes
that move with music. The fountain is shut down for the winter and
protective caps placed over the jets to prevent damage.

. . . to the complex
Of course there are other hydraulic special effects in the fountain
designers' toolbox besides the relatively simple vertical jet. Show
Fountains in Spring, Tex. (www.showfountains.com), for example,
tweaked the vertical jet a bit and turned it into a water lariat. "It's merely
a nozzle installed off-axis and mounted on a rotating bearing cup," says
Michael Connery, president and CEO of the company. "Rotation comes
from water jets on the side of the cup or, if synchronization is critical, we
use a motor drive. And mounting several nozzles on one rotating head
creates a more elaborate rotating effect." If several lariats are used in a
fountain, operators precisely control pump-head pressures to ensure
they all spin at the same speed.
Water specialists at WET Design, L.A., designed and patented a
variation on the water lariat: the Oarsman. It's a self-contained robotic
nozzle that includes a variable-frequency drive, pump, and lights.
"Operators or a preprogrammed computer feed it electricity and control
data, and it responds by positioning the nozzle in the X-Y axis and
adjusting its flow rate for just the right stream height," says Tony Freitas,
manager of architecture and facility engineering at WET Design. (WET,
by the way, stands for Water Entertainment Technology.) "An Oarsman
takes water right out of the fountain and pumps it out at up to 120 gpm.
There are no water pipes connected to an Oarsman."

High rollers and tourists seem transfixed by the fountain WET Design created at Bellagio
Casino and Hotel. The eight-acre fountain uses 135 miles of wires and cables. When all

hydraulic special effects are sending water into the air, the water level in the eight-acre
fountain drops 0.25 in.

Oarsmen were invented for WET's piece de resistance, the eight-acre fountain
in front of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. They needed a goodsized jet that could gracefully wave back and forth, smoothly change height,
spin, and do it all in time to music. The Bellagio fountain originally had 214
Oarsmen installed, but after some on-site testing and fine-tuning, the WET
team removed about a dozen.

Before WET could use the Oarsman, however, it had to develop a ground
fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) that could handle Oarman's unusual
characteristics. "We were using 208-V, three-phase motors, which are
not your typical motors, variable-frequency drives for the pump, and
stepper motors for moving the nozzles. All this generates noise and
harmonics on the line that conventional GFCI see as current leakage,"
points out Freitas. "But we didn't try to get a variance or get around the
regulations, we just went ahead and designed a GFCI."
WET also has vertical jets called Shooters, and they're used at Bellagio,
but they differ from those found in other designers' fountains. There's
actually a whole line of Shooters that use the same principles, ranging
from NanoShooters to Supershooters.
Shooters consist of a receiver for compressed air, a cylindrical holding
tank, and some clever valving. In operation, a valve on the holding tank
opens, fills with water from the fountain, and closes. A pipe sends
compressed air from an equipment room "onshore" to the receiver where
it is stored. When the Shooter is "fired," a valve opens, sending
compressed air rushing into the holding tank where it becomes an
expanding bubble forcing water out of the tank through a nozzle. "So
Shooters can't create jets that last all day," explains Freitas. "They're for
instantaneous shots. And the bigger the Shooter, the longer it takes to
refill the holding tank, so the longer the lag between consecutive shots."
Operators control jet height by adjusting the volume of pressurized air
released into the holding tank.
NanoShooters, the smallest in the Shooter family, have holding tanks 2
in. in diameter by 18 in. tall and need only a couple pounds of air
pressure, yet propel water 10 to 12 ft high. "They're good for interactive
displays," says Freitas, "Especially in large numbers when we create a
forest of thin, low-force water jets."

Shooting water like a laser

Axisymmetric laminar flow (ALF) devices generate streams of water with
all the water particles having the same flow rate and direction, much like
photons in a laser. They look like glass parabolas of water that seem to
hang in the air. Observers really can't tell the arcs contain moving water
until the flow is switched off. Then they can watch the well-defined tail of
the curve chase the hoop of water back into the fountain. Some devices
quickly turn on and off, creating 2 or 3 ft of curved water that follows a
parabolic path back into the fountain.
Mark Fuller, founder of WET Deign, studied ALF and wrote his
undergraduate civil-engineering thesis on the subject at Stanford
University. He later went on to feature ALF in Leapfrog, a fountain he
designed while working at Disney's Epcot Center.
"We use traditional pumps to pressurize the water, but then send it
through a series of chambers, straighteners, and baffles to line up the
flow and bring it all to the same speed. Then it leaves the nozzle," says
Tony Freitas, a WET Design engineer. "Most streams are about a halfinch wide and travel 15 ft, reaching about 15 ft high. And we can do
smaller. But it gets more difficult as you make them larger."
Surface tension helps keep them together in an ALF stream. But when a
large stream hits the apex of its arch and accelerates downward, different
parts of the stream begin traveling at different speeds. This warps and
distorts the once coherent flow, breaking it up. "We've done studies with
flows several inches wide and they look good, but not perfect," says
Freitas. "It is just difficult to scale up. But we're still working on it."
Another Shooter in the arsenal, the MiniShooter, sends water up to 125 ft
into the sky. Bellagio has 798 of them. SuperShooters, the top of the line,
use holding tanks that stand 12-ft tall, 1 ft in diameter, and hold about 75
gallons. Their air is stored at 200 psi in 60-gallon receivers. When it is
released into the tank, the pressure launches a plume 245 ft high through
a 2.5-in. nozzle. Bellagio boasts 192 SuperShooters.
"Not all the water goes to 245 ft," points out Freitas. "When we tested the
SuperShooters, all the water did go to the apex. But some of it was
already coming down, passing through itself, as the last of the water was
still going up. We discovered it looks better if pressure declines during

the shot. So the top goes to 245 ft and the bottom only goes to 50 ft,
making it look more like a standing column of water."
Another problem with SuperShooters involved the huge pressure drop
across the air-control valve. It was forming ice in the valve body. "To
cure that, we put a pressure plate a few feet upstream to control the
pressure drop. The plate drops the pressure in half, then pressure drops
again at the nozzle. Fortunately, it doesn't affect the display much."
Another possible solution, he adds, would be to add an air-drying
subsystem to the fountain. "Bellagio has such a big air system, we
decided not to. But if we were doing it again, we might include dryers."
Shooters and other devices that rely more on air pressure than water
pumps save money, energy, and installation costs according to Freitas.
"It would take a 300-hp pump to create one 245-ft-high jet, and there
are almost 200 SuperShooters at Bellagio. You would need 60,000-hp
worth of pumps and the whole system would have to be sized as if it
always worked at maximum load. Compressed air, on the other hand,
can be stored, letting you size the system for the average load. We run
the compressors continuously and bank air for peak moments. So our
compressors, standard rotary screw models, occupy one-tenth the space
pumps would. And the pipes sending compressed air out to the various
Shooters can be much smaller than the pipes that would be needed to
carry incompressible water for equivalent jets."
A more conventional special effect is WET Design's Popjets. Using
traditional plumbing and pumps, it creates little marbles of water that
can rise about 5 ft, still retaining their spherical shapes. A special nozzle
and valve quickly release about a tablespoon of water that forms the
liquid spheres. "They're great for close-up displays and interactive
fountains since they're friendly even to small children."
For more subtle effects and relaxing fountains, WET often deploys
WaterSkins and WaterIrises. Waterskin is a thin membrane of water on
polished black granite or stone. The water is about an eighth of an inch
deep and thins somewhat as it goes over an edge. "It creates a highly
reflective surface, but it requires good flow delivery that doesn't disturb
the surface, very flat surfaces, and sharp edges. After that, physics does

the rest. And while we didn't invent this, it is on our palette, and like all
our efforts, we try to take it to a level as near to perfect as we can get."
A WaterIris, in WET terms, is a circular hydraulic jump, and a hydraulic
jump is water transitioning from supercritical to subcritical. "More
simply, water comes out of a nozzle very fast into a basin," explains
Freitas. "When it slows to a certain point, the water suddenly gets
thicker. It's like watching a wave washing in and out from the center of
the basin. Slowly varying the flow rate makes the transition point change
and generates a very soothing sound."

Fog on demand
Another element used in fountains to set the mood is fog created either
by atomizing water or adjusting temperature and humidity. To use the
first method, WET Design sends water at 2,000 psi and 0.05 gpm
through a 0.006-in. nozzle. The water hits a steel pin positioned
precisely over the hole's center and bursts into tiny water particles
making mist or fog. "In small close-up displays, we might use 30
nozzles," notes Freitas. "Bellagio has 5,000."

The Grove at L.A.'s Farmer's Market features a WET Design fountain. It was first modeled
on VirtualWET, a 3D particle-simulation software package that calculates and displays
water forms and lets designers explore options.

The second method usually involves injecting cool nitrogen into a chamber
filled with warm, supersaturated air. The water condenses into airborne water
droplets, or fog. The nitrogen expands, pushing the fog out into the display.
"It's a drier, finer mist than the brute force method," says Freitas. "It also
doesn't make floors slippery or leave a residue. This makes it well suited for
indoor use. But it does have a consumable, the nitrogen."

How long the fog lasts and what it does is up to Mother Nature. "Once we
create it, it's out of our hands," says Freitas. "When we tested Bellagio's
fog system, for example, it created a great bank of fog that started
moving toward the road. Before we knew it, fog had engulfed the Strip.
Drivers were slamming on the brakes, tires were squealing, and we
expected to see a hundred-car pile up. Luckily, there were no collisions
and no one got hurt." That's one reason human operators at the Bellagio
fountain can intervene in the computer programming that controls the
foggers.
Engineers at Show Fountains use fog for something more palpable than
setting a mood. They create giant 'water screens" and project movies on
them. At first, they relied on the brute-force method, sending 300-psi
water into an angled steel plate. The water would smack into the plate
and send a sheet of water droplets straight up. "Later developments
refined this plate-deflection method and we now use pumps with far less
power to create screens 50 ft high and 100 ft wide," says Show
Fountain's Connery. "And for some reason, small screens are more fussy
about nozzle openings, angles of deflection, and pump pressure than
larger screens, Extra time is always needed to fine-tune the smaller
nozzles that create screens 15 to 20 ft tall."

Engineers at Show Fountains designed the Precious Moments Fountain of Angels in

Carthage, Mo. It uses 100,000 gallons of water and 235,000 watts of light to showcase over
300 larger-than-life statues, some of which weigh over 1,000 lb. Special effects include
foam jets, water castles, candelabra, a mist screen, and even a 75-ft-tall geyser.

Water screens are most effective when images are projected from the rear and
in large formats, such as 70-mm film. "Filmmakers record video specifically
for water-screen shows, taking full advantage of the magical appearance of
images seemingly bursting out of the surrounding water," says Connery.

Mixing fire and water

To add pizzazz to fountains, some designers offer clients devices that
showcase fire. A relatively simple one, the Fire Tornado from WET,
consists of a tube into which air is sent and made to swirl using a blower.
"Add gas and an igniter, and you have a fiery tornado whirling in a tube.
You can even touch the tube without getting burned," says Freitas.
A more ambitious and unusual device, WetFire, combines fire and water.
It has its genesis in a project WET did for a casino outside San Diego. At
night, the fountain was to serve as a stage for a drama involving human
actors. At one point a campfire was supposed to emerge from a pool of
water. "At first, we envisioned a small jet of natural gas or propane
bubbling up through the water. It's been used before, including at the
volcano in front of the Mirage Casino," says Freitas. "But we found gas
burns 'inside' aerated jets of water. You don't just get fire sitting above
water. Instead, you get this mysterious combination of fire and water
coexisting."
One challenge with fire devices, and it is common to all fountain
technology, is that engineers have to find a way to hide the equipment.
When they can, WET uses pyroigniters that can be replaced before every
performance. Otherwise, they do their best to hide electrical igniters.
"We design highly technical systems that should appear to not use any
technology at all," says Freitas. "We want them to see flowing water and
beautiful finishes like stainless steel and polished granite, not pipes and
igniters, no valves clicking, no computers flashing."