Waterjetting 33b - More on flow inlet conditions

The structure of the jet flow from an orifice makes a tremendous difference to the ability that the jet then has in terms both of its range and its cutting ability. And one of the major factors that control the structure of the jet lies in the flow conditions just upstream of the orifice itself. From time to time, over the decades, we would go out and buy every nozzle that was available for a certain purpose, and run tests between them, trying to find which would, under otherwise similar conditions, provide the best performance. Rarely did the most expensive nozzle give the best result. And the performance of even the best nozzle was also controlled by the flow channel upstream of that nozzle. This, in turn, controlled the condition of the water entering the nozzle. To illustrate the point let me use the example of some tests we made with fan-jet nozzles. In this particular case to objective was to clean large surfaces, but the generalized conclusion also holds true of nozzles of different shapes and jets up to even the highest of pressures used (and we have gone up to 10 million psi).

Simple cleaning nozzles, of the sort that are used in most pressure washers, have historically produced fan-jets that spread in one plane away from the orifice. There are a large variety of these on the market, of varying flow rate and geometry, and it was an initial challenge to find a simple way of relatively ranking the jet quality. Our initial answer, for the first cut, was to take blocks of polystyrene foam and traverse these at a fixed speed under the jet at different pressures and distances from the nozzle. This foam is very easily cut by a jet. So the tests were carried out at 1,000 psi and 2,000 psi, which is the range of pressures of the electrically powered pressure washers found in most hardware stores these days. The difference between two nozzles that were nominally supposed to achieve the same performance was striking:

Figure 1. Comparison of performance between a “better” fan nozzle (top) and a “poor” one (lower sample) when cutting polystyrene packing foam at low pressures.

As you may note at 1,000 psi the poor design was barely able to remove the surface of the polystyrene, rather than cutting deeply into it, as was the case with most of the nozzles tested, and as exemplified in the top cuts.

My point today however, is not the inherent faults in the design of the nozzle shape itself, but rather to highlight the problems that the particular design had, as a result of the way that water was fed into the orifice.

For in this case, unlike many of the conventional nozzles, where the flow is directed directly at the orifice down a channel aligned with the orifice, the nozzle were small discs arrayed along a spray bar, of the type that is used for car and truck washing rigs where a single channel feeds a number of sprays.

The flow in this case is primarily along the distribution manifold, and, as such, perpendicular to the axis of the resulting jets. When the water, therefore, exits from the individual nozzles it retains a component of this lateral velocity, and this tears the jet apart relatively close to the nozzle. The results are evident in the cut made in the lower half of Figure 1.

It is surprisingly easy to remedy this. A short tube inserted behind the nozzle orifice, and protruding up into the manifold channel allows the water some chance to collimate in the direction of flow before it accelerates through the nozzle orifice, and the result, relative to the original cut is quite significantly better.

Not that short lengths of tube are completely effective, but they are a start. One of the more effective means of getting a water jet to move as a cylinder in short jets (such as those seen at Disneyworld and at Detroit Airport is to run the water from the supply pump through a small stabilizing chamber and then pass it into a collimating tube full of drinking straws (or their technical equivalent) which sit just behind the nozzle. Providing the geometries are properly selected you can get the very smooth cylinders of water that are a feature of the jumping streams.

A similar structure lies upstream of the the nozzle at the Gateway Geyser across the river from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The fountain shoots a jet of water to the same height (630 ft) as the Gateway Arch on the other side of the river, and to quote Wikipedia:

the Gateway Geyser was designed and constructed by St. Louis–based Hydro Dramatics. It was completed in 1995 at a cost of $4 million. Three 800-horsepower (600 kW) pumps power the fountain, discharging 8,000 U.S. gallons of water per minute (50 L/s) at a speed of 250 feet (76 m) per second. The fountain has an axial thrust of 103,000 pounds-force (460 kN); water is jetted out of the 6-foot (1.8 m)-tall aerated nozzle at a pressure of 550 pounds per square inch (3.8 MPa).

These are more complex flow straighteners than the simpler ones that are used in low pressure cleaning systems, and with considerable effect in controlling the jet flows from the monitors of hydraulic mining equipment. By channeling the water into a multitude (perhaps 200) small diameter channels and then recombining the water at the nozzle the resulting flow is laminar.

Where the water flow is much lower, such as when being used in an ultra-high pressure system, the flow can be stabilized by allowing a long straight run-up of the pipe leading into the nozzle. (Typically the rule of thumb was that the length should be around 125 pipe diameters, however work at the U.S. Bureau of Mines showed that the length of straight section did not need to be this long – a length of around 4-inches proved effective.)

Figure 2. The improvement in jet performance with a straight inlet section (after Kovsec et al*)

A similar improvement can also be seen when the flow conditions are correct when working with higher pressure jets.

As a general rule, however, such care is not taken in the construction and lead-in to the nozzles, and the jet will begin to taper and reduce in effective diameter from the time that it leaves the nozzle.

I’ll talk more about that, next time.

*Kovscek, P.D., Taylor, C.D. and Thimons, E.D., Techniques to Increase Water Pressure for Improved Water-Jet-Assisted Cutting, US Bureau of Mines RI 9201, Report of Investigations, 1988, pp 10.

Waterjetting 8d - Choosing angles

How times change! I was reading a column in the British Farmer’s Weekly, and came upon this, where the author is discussing the need for a generator.:

It will also be vital to keep the fuel flowing into the tractors, and power the pressure washer, and light the security lights, and all the other essentials of an average arable farm.

It is an indication of how far the use of pressurized water has come, that it is now seen, at the lower end of its application, as a vital farming tool. Which is a good introduction to talk a little further about the use of cleaning streams, and how to interact with differing target materials.

There was an initial first step, when someone would send the lab a mystery block of material and asked – how do I cut it? Generally the samples were small, but we would find a flat surface on the material, and carefully point a jet nozzle perpendicular to this surface. (In the early stages this was hand-held). When a jet strikes a surface, but can’t penetrate it, then it will flow out laterally around the impact point, under the driving force of the following water.

The test began with the jet at low pressure, and this was slowly raised, until the point was reached when the pressure was high enough to just start cutting into the material. At this point the jet had made a small hole in the target, and so the water flowing into that hole had to get out of the way of the water following. The sides of the hole stop it flowing laterally, and so it now shoots back along the original jet path. This spray can hit the lance operator if the nozzle is hand-held, but it is a fairly graphic way of determining the threshold pressure at which the material starts to cut. (and I’ll get into what happens as the pressure continues to go up in a future series of posts).

But for the purpose of cleaning, the jet has to move over the surface, once it has made that initial hole, at pressure. But, in many materials, if the jet comes vertically down onto the target, then only the material directly under the jet will be removed. And so the jet has to be played on every square inch of the surface in order to ensure that it is cleaned, or that the coating/layer is removed. In some sandstones, for example, two jet paths could be laid down, almost touching one another, and yet the rib of material between them would remain standing.


Figure 1. Adjacent jet passes in sandstone, the cuts are about an inch deep, but note that even though the narrowest rib is about 1/8th of an inch wide, it is only when the cuts touch that the intervening material is removed.

Yet that rib of material was, in that case, so weak that it was easy to break it off with a finger. (This turns out to be a weakness in making delicate sculptures out of rock). To use the full pressure of the water can be a waste of energy, if the material is very thick, since it all must be eroded with such a direct attack.

Yet the minimum amount of material that needs to be removed is that that attaches the layer to the underlying material (the substrate concrete, steel etc) and this can be quite thin. Thus, in attacking a softer material, particularly one that can be cut with a fan jet, a shallow angle directed at the edge of the substrate can be more effective.


Figure 2. Round v fan cleaning from Hughes (2nd US Waterjet Conference)

Because there is a balance between cutting down through the material to be removed, and cutting along the edge to grow the separation crack between the materials, some practice is needed to find, for a given condition, what that angle would be.


Figure 3. Choice of angle from Hughes (2nd Waterjet Conference)

The more brittle the material, then the greater the angle to the surface, since rather than just erode the material, the jet may also shatter the layer into fragments that extend beyond the cut path. But otherwise using an angled jet to the surface can be more effective. Hughes (from whose paper at the 2nd Waterjet Conference I took these illustrations) has a simple test for orifice choice.


Figure 4. How target response influences nozzle selection. (Hughes 2nd Waterjet Conference)

Some of the more advanced cutting heads use a series of nozzles that spin within an outer protective cover, as they remove anything from layers of damaged concrete to thin layers of paint from ship hulls. Increasingly these are connected to vacuum systems that will draw away the spent water and debris from within the contained space, without it entering the work space, and creating problems for the worker.

In order to reduce any collateral damage to the surroundings these jets are often made very small (thousandths of an inch in diameter) so that their range is short, and they are inclined outward to cut to the edges of the confining shield.

We have had some success in turning those angles the other way, so that they cut into the shield, rather than away from the center, and also so that each jet is directed towards the path of the next jet around the circumference. The intent in this case is to allow the use of a slightly larger jet, with a greater cutting range. In this case the individual cleaning/cutting path is a little larger, but because the jet at then end of the cut moves into the range of the adjacent jet, then any remaining energy that it and the dislodged debris still have, will not be enough to get through this second jet.


Figure 5. Inclined jet and shroud design.

The action of each jet then becomes not only to cut into and remove material, but also to contain the spent material from the other jets dispersed around the cutting arm, and to hold the debris in the center of the confinement for the very short time needed for it to be caught up in the vacuum line.

In all cases the choice of pressure, nozzle size, and operational factors such as angle of attack, come down to the target materials, those that have to be removed, and those that need to be left undamaged. And it is why it is useful, at the start of any new job, to take the time to do a little testing first, to make sure that the right choices of nozzle and angle have been made to get the job done quickly and efficiently.

Incidentally the idea behind the test of effective pressure, that the jet flows laterally when it hits something it can’t cut, can help, for example in easing the meat from the bone when a jet cuts a deer leg.


Figure 6. Cut across a deer leg, note how the jet has cleaned off the meat from the bone, undercutting the flesh.

Waterjetting 7c - higher pressure washing with power

In the last post, on surface cleaning, I showed how the jet from a fan nozzle spread very quickly once the water left the orifice. With this spread the stream got thinner, to the point that, very rapidly the jet broke into droplets. These droplets decelerate very rapidly in the air, and disintegrate into mist which rapidly slows down. That mist has little capacity but to get a surface wet, and thus, within a very short few inches, the jet loses power and the ability to clean.

How can we overcome this? Obviously the jet would work better if it could carry the energy to a greater distance. And the jet that does that (as we know from trips to Disney) is a cylindrical stream. In some parts of the cleaning trade this is known as a zero degree jet, to distinguish it from the fifteen degree or other angular designation of the fan jet nozzles that it is often sold with.

But the problem with a single cylindrical jet is that it has a very narrow point of application. Depending on the standoff from the nozzle to the target this will increase a little as the distance grows, but is still likely to be less than a tenth of an inch. That, by itself, would make cleaning a bridge deck a long and laborious job. But consider that if we spun the jet so that it is tilted out to cover a 15 degree cone, the same angle as the best of the fan jets, the water would travel further. With a good nozzle it is possible to extend the range to 3 ft, rather than the typical 4 inches of a fan jet.


Figure 1. The gain in performance when a fan spray is changed to a rotating cylindrical jet. (initially proposed by Veltrup, these are our numbers).

In both cases the water flows out of the orifice at the same volume and pressure. But with the rotating jet the water is able to carry the energy some 9 times as far. As a result the area covered is 9-times as wide, and the job is carried out faster.

You can also look at it another way. It takes only about 10% of the water and the power to clean the surface with the rotating jet, as opposed to the amount required to clean with the fan jet. This is even though the pump unit and the flow rates are the same in both cases. This is why, when you buy some of the smaller pressure washers, they include a nozzle that has a round orifice and which then oscillates within a holder. Not quite as efficient as a controlled movement, but at least it is a start.

Now, of course, life is never quite as simple as it at first appears. Because the jet is being rotated there is sometimes, if the jet is being spun fast enough, some breakup of the jet because of the speed of rotation. And so, in the above example, too high rotation speed would have a disadvantage. Doug Wright showed this in a paper he presented to the WJTA in 2007.
Figure 2. The effectiveness of a rotating jet, at two speeds and at different distances (Doug Wright 2007 WJTA Conference Houston).

On the other hand because the jet has to make a complete rotation before it comes back to the same point on the coverage width, if the lance is moving too fast relative to that turning speed, then the jet will miss part of the surface that it is supposed to be cleaning.

I can illustrate this with a sort of an example. To make it obvious the rotating jet has enough power to cut into the material that it is being spun, and moved over. If the rotation speed is too slow, relative to the speed that the head is moving over the surface, then the grooves cut into the surface won’t touch one another and small ribs of material are left in the surface. This is not a good thing, either from a cleaning or mining perspective. The material we were cutting in this case was a simulated radioactive waste, that an improved design later went on to extract as a “hot” material in a real world project. These materials tend to be unforgiving if they are not properly cleaned off.


Figure 3. Cutting path into simulant showing the grooves and ribs where the rotation speed is not properly matched to the speed of the head over the surface.

There is another answer, which is becoming more popular for a couple of different reasons. If the pressure of the water is increased, then the jet will remain coherent for a greater distance, at a higher rotation speed. Going to a higher rotation speed, also brings in an additional change in the design of the cleaning head.


Figure 4. Cleaning head concept sectioned to show vacuum capture of the debris through the suction line after the jet has removed the material and washed it into the blue cylinder.

As the pressure increases, so the energy of the water and the debris rebounding from the surface increase. To a point this is good, since once they are away from the surface it is relatively simple, if the cleaning operation is confined within a small space by a covering dome, to attach a vacuum line to the dome, and suck all the water and debris into a recovery line. The surface remains relatively dry, all the water and debris is captured, and the tool can be made small enough, and light enough, that it can be moved either by a man or on the end of a robotically controlled arm. (The arm we designed the head for was over 30-ft long, which means that the forces from the jets had to be quite small).

With the higher pressure also comes the advantage that the amount of water that is required, for example to remove a lead-bearing paint from a surface, is much lower. If the water becomes contaminated by the material being washed off, then not only has the total volume to be collected, which is an expense, but it also must be stored and then properly be disposed of. And that may cost several times the cost of the actual cleaning operation, if the contaminant is particularly nasty. So reducing the volume of the water is particularly useful.

A friend of mine called Andrew Conn came up with the idea, for removing asbestos coatings from buildings, of tailoring the pressure and the flow from the nozzles, so that the amount of water required was just enough that it was absorbed by the asbestos as it was removed. Simplified and reduced the costs of cleanup, where that was a significant part of the overall price.

And speaking of using higher-pressure water, this means that there is no need for the abrasive additive, when cleaning say a ship hull. And that means that there is no need to buy, collect, and dispose of the abrasive during the operation.


Figure 5. Spent cleaning abrasive at a shipyard.

There are other advantages to the use of high pressure water over abrasive when cleaning metal, and I’ll talk about that subject a little next time.

Waterjetting 7b - more insight into jet structure

In last week’s post I showed some high-speed photographs of the plain water jets that come from the small diamond and sapphire orifices and that are useful in cutting a wide variety of target materials. Before moving away from the subject of high-speed photography, this post will use results from that technique to talk about why pressure washer nozzles may not work well, and have limited range. From there it will raise the topic of adding abrasive to a waterjet stream.

Most of us, I suspect, by this point in time, have used a pressure washer to do some cleaning, typically around the house or perhaps at a car wash. The jet that comes out of the end of the nozzle is typically a fan-shaped stream that widens as the water moves away from the orifice. This flattening of the jet stream, and the resulting spreading jet is achieved by cutting a groove across the end of the nozzle to intersect either a conic or ball-ended feed channel from the back end of the nozzle.


Figure 1. Schematic of how a fan–generating orifice is often made.

One of the problems with this simple manufacturing process is that the very sharp edge that is produced to give a clean jet leaving the nozzle is very thin at the end. This means that with water that is not that clean (and most folk don’t filter or treat pressure washer water) the edge can wear rapidly. I have noted several designs (and we tested many) where the jet lost its performance within an hour of being installed, particularly with softer metal orifices. And in an earlier post I did show the big difference between the performance of a good fan jet and a bad.

So how do photographs help understand the difference, and explain why you should generally keep a fan jet nozzle within about 4-inches of a surface it you are trying to clean it. That does, however, depend on the cone angle that the jet diverges at, once it leaves the nozzle. We found that a 15-degree angle seemed to work best of the different combinations that we tried. If the jet remained of sufficient power, this would mean that it would clean a swath about half-an inch wide with the nozzle held 2-inches above the surface. At 4-inch standoff it will clean a swath about an inch wide, and at 6 inches, this goes up to over an inch-and-a-half. But that would require that the jet be of good quality, and evenly distributed.


Figure 2. Back-lit flash photograph of a fan jet, at a jet pressure of around 1,000 psi. It is less than 6 inches from the end of the orifice to the rhs of the picture.

In Figure 2, the lack of water on the outer edges of the stream shows that the water is not being evenly distributed over the fan. As the water volume leaves the orifice, the sheet of water begins to spread out into the wider, but thinner, sheet that forms the fan. But as it gets wider it also gets thinner, and, like a balloon, water can only be spread so thin before the sheet begins to break up. As soon as it starts to do so, the surface tension in the water causes it to pull back into roughly circular rings of droplets.


Figure 3. Fan jet breakup from a spreading sheet into rings (or strings) of large droplets that rapidly break down into mist.

These droplets start out as relatively large in size, but they are moving at several hundred feet per second, and as single droplets moving through stationary air the air rapidly breaks them up into smaller droplet sizes, and then into mist, while at the same time slowing the droplets down. The smaller they get the quicker that deceleration occurs. When droplets get below 50 microns in size they become ineffective. (From a study that was done on determining the effect of rain on supersonic aircraft).


Figure 4. Showing the stages of the fan jet breakup from a solid sheet to mist that does little but wet the surface that it strikes.

However, if the nozzle is held just in that short range where the droplets have formed, but have not broken down, then the jet will be more effective than it would have been at any other point along its length. This is because of something that was first discovered when scientists at the Royal Aircraft Establishment-Farnborough and at the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University were studying what would happen if they flew a Concorde into rain, while it was still going supersonic. (They actually tried this in a heavy rain storm in Asia and found it was a seriously bad idea).

The pressures that can develop under the spherical droplet can exceed twice the water hammer pressure so that the impact pressure on the surface can exceed 20-times the driving pressure supplied by the pump. But the region effected is very small, and the effect diminishes as the surface gets wetter. And the problem, as with all waterjet streams, is that it is very hard to know where that critical half-inch range is. It varies even within the same nozzle design models due to small changes on the edge of the orifice. And as a very rough rule of thumb, a perfect droplet moving at a speed of around 1,000 ft/sec will travel 138 diameters before it is all mist. Most drops aren’t perfect and thus will travel around 30 – 50 diameters and once they turn into mist they will decelerate to having no power in less than quarter-of-an-inch. The implication of this, which we checked with field experiments, is that if you hold a pressure washer nozzle with a fan tip more than 4-6 inches from the target you are largely just wetting the surface, and spending a fair amount of money in creating turbulent air.

This story of jet breakup is a somewhat necessary introduction to two posts that I will be along before long. The first will be to discuss how we can use a different idea for nozzle designs to do a much better job, at greater standoff distances, and I will tie that in with some of the advantages of going to much higher pressure to do the cleaning job.

The other avenue that this discussion opens relates to how we mix abrasive within the mixing chamber of an abrasive nozzle design, and that will come along a little later.

(For those interested in more reading there have been a series of Conferences on Rain Erosion, and then “Erosion by Solid and Liquid Impact” which were held under the aegis of John Field at Cambridge for many years. See, for e.g.. Field, J.E., Lesser, M.B. and Davies, P.N.H., "Theoretical and Experimental Studies of Two-Dimensional Liquid Impact," paper 2, 5th International Conference on Erosion by Liquid and Solid Impact, Cambridge, UK, September, 1979, pp. 2-1 to 2-8. The founding conference was held under the imprimatur of the Royal Society, which devoted a volume to the Proceedings. Phil. Trans. Royal Society, London, Vol. 260A.)

Waterjetting 6c - Cutting foam and testing with it.

Last week’s post discussed a simple test which helps to show not only how to compare the effect of different operating conditions (varying abrasive type, nozzle design, AFR etc) as a way of finding a possibly better and cheaper cut. It is also often handy to know when a nozzle is starting to wear out, so that different cutting operations might be scheduled to allow the nozzle to continue to work, without threatening the quality of critical product.


Figure 1. Change in the cutting depth of a jet stream, at 50,000 psi, when traversed over ASTM A108 steel as a function of the time that the nozzle had been in use.

While we have found that nozzles from a given manufacturer roughly agree in cutting performance and times before they wear out, the pattern of wear and performance change differs from one nozzle design to another. Also there is some variation in performance between nozzles even of the same design and under the same conditions.

There are also times when cuts are made without abrasive, or when the cutting/cleaning jet is hand held – what to do in those cases? Mainly we have used foam as the cutting target, set up so that the jet won’t cut all the way down through the foam all the way along the cut, so that, as with the steel, some idea of not only cutting depth but also cut quality can be seen.


Figure 2. Cuts through thick stiff packing foam. Note the rough edge at the bottom of the extracted pieces, but the good initial quality of cut that was achievable for some 14-inches.

There is a caution in cutting foam, in that some of the softer varieties are going to fold into the cut, and give a slightly inaccurate measure of true performance, although for a quick comparison to see how a nozzle is lasting that is not a real issue. When cutting thicker material, and also when going for higher quality cuts, that is, however, something that should be borne in mind.

The white expanded foam that is used as a packing material is also very easy to cut, even with the pressures that can be found with a pressure washer type of system. Thus, if you are going to clean a deck or other surface it helps to check, by swiping the jet across such a piece of material, to be sure that you have a good nozzle on the end of your lance before you start.

This may seem fairly logical, after all you just went to the hardware store and bought a new packet of nozzles. Well, as with the other nozzles we have looked at, quality is only assured after testing. In this particular case we ran as many different variety of fan nozzles as we could to see how they would perform when cutting across a piece of packing foam. It is not hard to cut packing foam with a high pressure jet. And since domestic cleaning is usually carried out at either 1,000 psi or 2,000 psi we ran tests at both levels.


Figure 3. Results from a good, top, and a poor nozzle with cuts at 1,000 and 2,000 psi. and with the foam moved through the jet at a distance of 3 inches. The number identifies the nozzle and note that at 3 inches number 18 could barely remove the top of the foam.

A fan jet is defined by the amount of water that it will allow to pass at a set pressure, and by the angle of the cone with which the jet spreads out from the orifice. In passing we found that the cone angle that the jet actually spread at was a little larger than that designated on the package.

The worst nozzle design that we found had difficulty in cutting into the foam, even at a very close range:

On the other hand the best nozzle was still able to cut the material with the nozzle held some nine inches from the foam.


Figure 4. Cutting result with the good nozzle held at nine inches above the foam target. At this distance the jet is removing as much material as the poor jet did at a 3-inch standoff.

A very typical result would have the jet fail to cut into the foam much beyond four inches from the nozzle. (I’ll use some photographs in a couple of weeks to explain in more detail why that is). And as a short editorial comment to those of you who clean around your house with a domestic unit, how many of you hold the nozzle that close to the surface? (Or at the car wash?) If you don't you are losing most of the power that you are paying for, and you are in the company of most of the students that I ran this demonstration with in my classes).

However there is one other feature to the photographs of the cuts that I would point out. Fan jets distribute the water over a diverging fan shape. But the results of the design fell into two different types, one where most of the water still concentrated in the middle of the jet, (as in Figure 4) and those where it was focused more on the side.


Figure 5. Cutting pattern with the jet streams more at the side of the flow. (arrow points), note that the two pressure cuts are on the other sides of the sample here).

The benefit of using foam is that it allows this picture of the jet structure to be easily seen, with very little time taken to swipe the nozzle over a test piece of material at the start of work, to make sure that the jet is still working correctly.

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Because the foam is relatively easy for a jet to cut, even at a lower pressure, this means that the cut can become more ragged with depth, where deep cutting is required.

One of the programs that we ran, some years ago, looked at how deeply you could cut into the stiff packing foam that is used in some industrial plants, where the item being packed needs to be held firmly, yet will be released easily when needed. This requires that the foam be cut to a very tight tolerance, and at the time, pieces were still being cut by hand and then glued together. (Figure 2 above)

We found that we could cut up to about a foot of material, before the small cut particles became sufficiently caught up in the cutting jet that the edge quality of the cut fell below specification. But in order to get to that depth we did have to add a small amount of a polymer to the cutting water. This helped to hold the jet more coherent over a greater distance, and also reduced the amount of particulate that got caught up in the jet, allowing the greater cutting depth.

Foam works as a simple sample to give some sense of the jet shape, where the pressures are lower. When they are higher then a stiffer material is needed, though it should still be cuttable by water without the need for abrasive. Plywood is a useful target in this case, and I will write about those tests next time.

Deepwater Oil Spill - Improving the Clean-up

Flow recovery update from the Gulf:

For the first 12 hours on June 20 (midnight to noon), approximately 6,790 barrels of oil were collected and approximately 4,280 barrels of oil and 23.2 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.

• On June 19, total oil recovered was approximately 21,040 barrels:
• approx. 11,050 barrels of oil were collected,
• approx. 9,990 barrels of oil were flared,
• and approx. 43.4 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.

One of the more innovative recent technical advances that you have likely never heard of is called Hydro-excavation. It combines the use of a water stream of the sort you find at a car wash (i.e. 2,000 psi water at about 2 gpm) with a vacuum hose attached to a vacuum truck. It turns out to combine into a new tool that is quite effective for disaggregating soil and removing it to leave a relatively dry cavity down to significant depth, quite fast. It has a lot of advantages if you are excavating in an area where there are fiber-optic cables and other underground conduits that might take unkindly to the use of a back-hoe, (Including gas lines).

I mention this, because there is a certain amount of the clean-up now going on in the Gulf that can be done with waterjet lances, and some parts of the spill can be cleaned up with suction hoses. (And I have some experience with both, courtesy of helping in the development mentioned in the first paragraph). One of the classes that I have taught involved the use of pressure washers in a demonstration laboratory that supported the class lectures. So I thought I would take a moment to mention some of the things that need to be considered when using pressure wands and suction hoses.

The first obvious, but neglected point, is that the operator rarely can judge exactly where the tip is relative to the surface being cleaned. This is actually quite critical because the average pressure wand comes with a fan tip on the end. The tips come with different angles of dispersion of the jet, and having photographed a fair number, most jets are about 5 degrees broader than the jet pattern stamped into the nozzle. The second point is the one that is usually missed, but which relates to the distance of the nozzle from the surface.

When the jet comes out of a fan jet nozzle, the shape of the nozzle forms the stream into a sheet that gets wider with distance. Because the volume of water coming out at one time doesn’t change, the jet therefore gets thinner the further that it gets away from the jet.

Flash Picture of a fan jet

With a typical nozzle (usually called a tip) the sheet gets thin enough somewhere between 2 and 4 inches that the sheet perforates, and just as with a balloon when it pops, the material pulls back from the hole. In the case of the water sheet, this creates circles of larger droplets that continue to move forward. It is at this point that the jet is at its most effective, in many applications.

However, those droplets that are moving originally at about 550 ft/sec are moving into air that is relatively stationary. It breaks these large droplets up and decelerates them over the next couple of inches. As a result, the jet becomes virtually powerless within about 6-inches of the nozzle. (The distance varies with nozzle manufacturer, design flow rate and operating pressure – but that distance is typical). If you hold the nozzle further away from the target than that you are merely getting the surface wet, and not moving anything but surface dirt.

The problem that you, as an operator, have is that it is very difficult to judge that 6-inches. (Making it easy to “catch the student in error” at the beginning of the lab and reinforce the lesson). So the simple way to resolve the problem, is to touch the target surface before you start, position your feet accordingly, and then back the lance off a little and you are likely to be much more effective.

Having cleaned a wall of my house with an 18-ft extension lance to the normal pressure washer last week, I can also add that trying to maintain a 2-4 inch standoff while holding the lance above your head is an art that has to be learned.

OK, now the next problem is that most of the material being removed is going to be some form of hydrocarbon (oil. Oil emulsion or something similar). Some of these are quite sticky and hard to remove with just water pressure. In this case if the water is heated to about 185 deg F it will cut through and remove those coatings a lot more easily than at a lower temperature. You don’t want to heat it all the way to steam, since that loses the pressure of the jet at the nozzle too quickly, but with hot water the range can be extended.

One other way to extend the range is to use a spinning round jet nozzle (sometimes called a 0 deg tip). There are a number of these on the market and the cone of the jet is created by rapidly spinning the cylindrical jet that comes out of the nozzle. Depending on the quality of the nozzle (and diameter and pressure) these can increase the jet range to a foot or more. If you work out the amount of energy and water required to clean a surface both ourselves and some folks in Germany have shown that using this rather than a fan-jet can drop the amount of energy and water that you use to clean that surface by up to 90%.

The final point I want to make deals with the use of suction hoses. These are now appearing more frequently in some of the locally made systems being fielded along the Gulf. While the same basic argument about the operator not knowing where the tip is, still applies, there is a different reason as to why this is important.

In most cases the object is to pull a relatively thin film of oil from the surface of the water. The ideal place to hold the end of the hose is just above the oil: water level (less than half-an-inch). The air drawn into the gap helps pull the surface layer into the hose, and you don’t pull in a lot of water.


Unless you have really good control of your position (bearing in mind you are looking along the hose at the water) this is very hard to sense. If you push the hose into the water hardly at all then you pull in too much water and not that much oil.

If you tilt the hose then it tends to pull in a lot of air, and not a whole lot of water or oil.


The best way to control the position is to have the end of the hose attached to a piece of foam that will float and in this way the mouth of the nozzle can be placed where you want it. It is easier to do this if you bend the hose so that most of it is lying on the foam, and not pushing it into the water, but in this way, depending on the amount of oil, you can slide the nozzle up and down in the foam to get the best distance to recover the oil.


That half-inch distance is fairly critical for best performance, especially if you can keep just below it. (Yeah we actually did experiments where we adjusted it).

There are now whole books on this technology, and some safety recommendations on how to use some of the equipment, as the industry continues to grow. Hopefully this has been of some help. What one learns in one application can be quite usefully applied, often in others.