Splash-free urinals: Design through physics and differential equations

thunderbong 17 points 5 comments September 04, 2026
academic.oup.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (5 comments)

lern_too_spel

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43668957

mistyvales

Larry David approved?

readme

I'm honestly passionate about this topic. For a while, around the time that urinals started to appear without water, I dealt with some serious splashback issues. I forget when I started aiming for the back of the urinal. I'm assuming that's the deflection angle the paper discusses. At one point I realized, I was sometimes getting some pretty bad splashback. Perhaps because I stood close to the urinal. So I asked a colleague. He said he aims for the hole, and was confused why anyone would piss on the back of the urinal. I started doing that -- problem solved. I am for a direct hit, every time. The problem is that some urinals have a protector over the hole to prevent really smart people and children from putting paper towels in there. That thing is dome shaped, and multiplexes the stream like a lawn sprinker. All of this, would not be necessary, if there were water at the bottom of the urinal.

gabrielsroka

Domain name checks out.

LorenPechtel

The basic problem is that making the angle low makes the urinal take up more space. Businesses don't like that.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
5,564 stories · 50,257 chunks indexed