Super Soaker Central

Method and apparatus for water jet cutting including improved nozzle

Patent 5,169,065 - Christopher J. Bloch

While this nozzle was design for extremely high pressure cleaning (i.e. over 2000 psi), it is probably the best nozzle invented for converting highly turbulent flow to laminar flow and then further to streamline flow. The abstract of the patent says "string line flow", but that is most likely a typographical error because string line flow is never mentioned in the patent again.

This nozzle has your basics - linear guidance walls and conical/reducing nozzle design. It should be said that the screens are absent in this design. From my reading of other patents (mostly faucet nozzles), I can easily see that the screens provide little function other than to slow down the stream, which we already know produces more laminar flow. That was my best guess before and I found it to be true. This nozzle is designed better than that. More information on exactly what the screens do will be explained in a future post or article.

One new feature that we have not previously seen makes me very excited. Christopher Bloch breaks down the parts into the pre-nozzle assembly, the nozzle orifice and the post-nozzle assembly. We have not seen a post-nozzle assembly as of yet.

This post-nozzle assembly in short protects the stream (almost like a shield). It creates a vacuum around the stream that protects it from breaking up. Of course, we do not know if this protection will be of much use in our "very low pressure" devices as described by the patent. At higher pressures this post-nozzle assembly may prove to be extremely useful however! This is an unseen technology as of yet. I am going to call this the "Bloch effect" unless it appears that he did not invent this effect himself.

He talks mostly about this nozzle as it is meant to be used, but he also admits that it can be used on "very low pressure" devices and talks about its use there as well. He gives a good general rule for stream breakup (let's call it "Bloch's rule") - a stream will typically break up in after it travels less than 100 times the nozzle size, depending on the power and other factors. If you think about this, it does work fairly well, but 100 times is far too short for our pressures.

This patent expired on December 11, 1996 due to a failure to pay a maintenance fee. This does mean that the nozzle is open for anyone to use even for profit.

Nozzle with turbulence control member for water gun laminar flow ejection

Patent 5,779,099 - Bruce D'Andrade

This is the famous water gun nozzle patent. This patent was the one that I had found probably over a year ago and posted about. In short, this is your basic Super Soaker nozzle as designed by Bruce D'Andrade, who was instrumental in designing the Super Soakers.

This nozzle has linear guidance walls and screens. That is how simple the Super Soaker nozzle is, likely because it will be easy to manufacture.

Sadly, Bruce is no longer alive, but he certainly has made his way into history! May he rest in peace.

Straight stream nozzle

Patent 5,472,145

The original nozzle design for range! This nozzle is specifically designed to make a "more highly concentrated stream which produces high impact at a substantial distance." Sounds great to me!

This is a very simple nozzle, and is very similar to the previous Super Soaker nozzle patent except that is lacks screens. The nozzle only has some sort of linear guidance walls, but they are put in an unusual pattern. As opposed to straws or some sort of straight wall, this patent has 5 holes and then 5 curved holes on the outside. This must provide better lamination for low pressure water streams.

Laminar spout attachment, Low noise, flow limiting, laminar stream spout

Patents 5,242,119 and 4,730,786

Both of these patents are for faucet nozzles. They use screens to reduce stream velocity and reduce the "associated flow noise." This improves stream lamination.

Not much more can be said about these patents. For more information on what exactly the screens do, please read the patents.