New urinal designs | Hacker News Reader

New urinal designs

livescience.com

99 pointsanjel126 comments

Not sure how these are that "new" seeing as Toto (and I'm almost assuming other Japanese brands too) have had designs like the Nautilus for some years. One of the things that stuck with me a lot after a trip to Japan was exactly how thoughtful their toilet designs are. Public toilets with these tall urinals were amazingly clean in even the busiest stations and would allow you to get a good angle and not have splash on to the floor/shoes. Similar designs but scaled down were found in their newer Limited Express trains. Also, that angular design makes no sense, a human being will need to clean it and for anyone whos ever had to clean angular ceramics, they will know that that design will just be a pain to get proper clean...

I guess what I'm saying is, before we start researching new methods, why can't we be bothered to spend even a little bit of time to see what else is out there.

The nautilus design is literally in the paper and they show that it's pretty good.

Their design seems a lot smaller though if you look at the pictures.

This design, in my opinion, deserves a Nobel Prize.

So, from the article, instruction placards reduce cleaning costs by 8%.

Obligatory nod to the infamous sign:

"Gents Please Stand A Little Closer, It May Be Shorter Than You Think.

"Ladies Please Remain Seated for The Entire Performance."

Men can sit too

On a urinal? Gross, and you may be misunderstanding what they're meant for.

And increase bathroom construction costs by 25-100% while reducing capacity by 50%! We don't have big shared troughs in sports stadium restrooms because of preference, it's purely cost and capacity. Urinals serve a similar purpose.

I’ve seen one that said “one step forward for man, a giant leap for mankind”. Pretty amusing.

Here in China, I’ve seen this sign dozens of times: “向前一小步，文明一大步”

One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.

I was going to mention - those signs are popular in Xiamen.

if your hose is short or your flow is weak, please stand close to not wet your feet - some toilet in rural texas

"Attention pilots with short pitot tubes or low manifold pressure: please taxi up close, as the next pilot may not be float equipped."

F Street Station, in Anchorage, AK

We had that contemporary commercial in one office building, but it was slightly elongated. The splash back was horrific and unavoidable. Angle, distance, approach, absolutely nothing prevented it. It was so bad we finally had open conversations about it and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.

The struggle is real.

At my employer we have an emergency location (glorified office) that we basically never operate out of except one afternoon a quarter to prove we can. The documentation about how to operate out of that site includes a warning to that effect.

Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.

Why would you need an emergency location? Not bashing just curious on the rationale

Contractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff.

Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.

That's fascinating. What kind of work do you do that involves such disaster planning?

Finance stuff. Where I work it's more of an inherited checkbox than an actual mission critical requirement but I suppose it would help us if it really came down to it and the customers see enough value in it that they pay for it so...

It makes sense to have a business continuity plan for various scenarios that could render the primary office location unusable (power outage, natural disaster, police closing the area for some reason, ...).

For many businesses, WFH or "everyone goes to the Winchester, we have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over" could be valid options, but if you want to have business continuity, having at least a small office where the disaster recovery team can meet and coordinate things from makes sense.

A contract for guaranteed priority access with a coworking space would likely be the easiest option unless you need some custom infrastructure though.

> and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.

Did it occur to "some of you" that _sitting_ on a regular toilet might also be a viable option?

Asking for a friend.

Think of the quads!

This is made a problem by people that insist on standing at a regular toilet or working through what I assume is a severe medical issue with reckless abandon for the next person

At home? Absolutely. In a public WC? Only in dire need.

The thing is, for men, sitting pee is only viable if *everyone* do it. As soon as a minority break this rule, the toilet is freaking dirty and you need to pee standing again.

At home though, 100%

Surely that’s only if people don’t lift / lower the seat? Or are people splashing that much?

just because some people have to sit peeing (cultural reason or otherwise) doesn't mean everyone else should do that when they don have to. The fact is that it has to "occur to" them instead of something they just naturally do.

Do people if any gender actually sit on public toilets? In my neck of the woods you are expected to hover unless you are at home...

> We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal. The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/80987...

The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine.

> A pseudo-urethra nozzle matching the internal geometry of a human urethra was used to “urinate” a controlled jet of dyed water onto urinals and the subsequent splash was caught on a large paper on the floor.

Anyone else here appreciate that this article appeared in a journal called 'PNAS Nexus'?

It's nut lost on me.

I'm glad you put your head out there and had the balls to say it.

> The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine.

Physics is physics though. Urine is not a magical substance that can violate conservation of momentum or the law of gravity.

> Urine is not a magical substance

No, but people do have urine (specific gravity, consistency, etc), physical (flow rate differences, penile dimensional differences, urinary meatus differences, etc), and behavioral differences (unkempt urinary meatus, different holding patterns, shaking, shy bladder, etc) which would affect those ideal scenarios.

No, it wouldn't. This is just angles. Angles don't change. Gravity is stable and points roughly to the center of the planet. Viscosity changes won't change the angle of anything. That's the entire point.

From the supplementary materials:

> Importantly, the dynamic viscosity µ and surface tension γ do not change across our experiments, nor in the context of human urination.

From the paper:

> Splash generated from a jet or droplet train impinging on a flat surface is a complex phenomenon depending on many factors, including the impact speed (U), impinging angle (θ), dynamic viscosity (μ), density (ρ), diameter of the jet or droplet (D), surface tension (γ) of the liquid, ambient pressure (P), as well as the wettability, contact angle, and roughness of the surface. ... In the context of urination, most of these factors cannot be changed. However, the impinging angle can be controlled to reduce or eliminate splash.

I think you misread that. That all says the general case might be more complex, but this specific subset of the problem isn't.

I didn't misread anything. I was replying to your claim with statements, from the paper itself, that invalidate your statement.

The study used an experimental design that ignores those variables, because, they claim, they do not apply to human urination, without citing any resources.

I hate to break it to you, but most of the urine on rhe floor isn't from splashback. Splashback is mostly solved with existing designs and splash screen/baffle inserts.

I agree. The urine on floor is because people are generally less careful in public toilet when aiming, peeing, fully draining, and flicking.

When we're outside, we are generally more in rush. We had to 'hold in' longer before peeing because of line. It's unfamiliar setting with weirdly shaped urinal.

And in some parts of Europe, urinals are installed so god damn high, I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.

> I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.

Sounds like an alternate origin story of your username.

Alternate? That's the origin.

I'll be using that going forward ;-)

I think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248)

The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice.

(Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).

Yea the cornucopia model makes me uncomfortable... sharp and o pointy angles and blind corners are not things I want near my dick.

Appropriate that it was published in "PNAS Nexus".

> Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S.

Each day?! 165 million males in the USA. So, 16.5 males on average are peeing enough on the walls and floors that if it was collected it would be an entire liter? That seems unlikely.

What percentage of that 16.5 is not using public restrooms? What percentage is babies in diapers? Even if the number was as high as half, 8 men leaving behind a collective 1 liter seems way too high.

I think you mean 165, not 16.5?

But probably, what, only 50m use public restrooms, but some use multiple times, so 150 uses / liter seems reasonable.

That's under 10ml of spray / spill per use, which is maybe a little high but not too crazy? I've seen some pretty bad spill results at work...

If you consider bar restrooms, that is probably skewing the average higher…

I think you drastically underestimate how much 10 ml are.

That's not achievable with backsplatter, that's called "missing".

It's almost but not quite exactly two teaspoons, which is certainly a plausibly achievable amount, but as you say, likely not by splatter.

There is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions:

1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US.

2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session)

3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!)

4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor.

So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters".

Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.

If only folks at Google’s Bayview Campus could learn to not piss all over the single occupancy bathroom’s toilet seats..

Bit of a tangent but occasionally I wonder how close we are to people disappearing into cyberspace for 10 hours at a time and thus using a Texas catheter à la Neuromancer. It seems like there are a notable minority of tech people who regard meat and meat space as an annoyance to be dealt with.

How many of you would be happy at this moment to upload yourself to the cloud if it meant low latency, unmitigated access to computers, the internet, LLMs etc?

upload yourself

You mean “upload a copy of yourself”, right? I guess I would be happy for my uploaded copy to live forever while I continue to age.

Perhaps that depends on your position on the you of Theseus.

From the perspective of each consciousness, the other is the copy...

It depends on how you were uploaded. If they scanned your brain and recreated it, that would be a copy. But what if they scanned your brain once a week and each week, replaced a billion neurons with cloud-based ones? There would never be a time where there were two “yous” and whatever personality changes that came from having faster and more accurate digital neurons would be spread out over several years, much like children growing into adults.

Let's explore the concept of "cloud based ones" neurons. Let's say your brain has just three neurons, connected with each other. You remove one of them, and connect the two remaining one an external terminal - a physical device capable of transmitting electrical currents, being controlled by some complicated software "in the cloud". That physical device becomes the third neuron. Instead of one terminal, it could be two different devices, together playing the role of the original third neuron for each of the two other original neurons. For simplicity, let's assume there's just one terminal, serving both remaining original neurons, just like the third original neuron did. From the point of view of the two remaining biological neurons, nothing has changed. But from the point of view of the third neuron - the replaced one - the system did change. Now it is connected to three other terminals: two original one, and one other physical terminal "in the cloud". That other terminal in the cloud is part of the software, so it is connected to potentially billions of other terminals (e.g. transistors). And all of them are now involved in playing the role of the original third neuron that we replaced. So we effectively replaced a system of three interconnected neurons with a system of billions of interconnected neurons. This can have a profound effect on the "consciousness" of the original brain (in quotes because I don't consciousness is possible with just three neurons).

Can you poke holes in the reasoning above?

>Can you poke holes in the reasoning above?

I don’t see why I would. It would change you and I said that in my original comment. But it would change you slowly over time on the order of years, much like how children change dramatically from say 7 to 17. They are still the same person even though their mental capacity and personality of grown and evolved significantly. I should have said a billion neurons a month, instead of a week though, since weekly would be replacement in less than two years but monthly would be over 8 years.

>So we effectively replaced a system of three interconnected neurons with a system of billions of interconnected neurons

If I had any quibble, it would be this statement. I while I would say it replaces a system of 3 parts with one with billions, I wouldn’t say it is effectively billions of neurons. In the same way I would say that emulating a mechanical watch in software would have much more transistors per watch part emulated, I wouldn’t say there were effectively billions of second hands.

Not sure if that's the cause of the problem here, but this is why having urinals is a good idea and even legally required in some countries.

I couldn't care less about whether the sit-down toilets are mixed or separated by gender, but replacing most/all urinals with gender-neutral sit-down toilets yields results that suck for everyone involved.

Even those dont solve the drip problem. The only solution is the ones with the grate you stand on.

The cone over the drain, and/or the spiked mats (both inside the urinal) seem to have stopped all splashing and be widely used in UK without need to change the urinal itself.

What one does find now is dyson-style hands dryers leave a massive area of spray. They seem to spray the water from your hands - and the water retained on the device - up into the air and across a wide area.

At our work place there are bench style sinks that spray water everywhere too.

And the sit-down toilets are terrible. I'm not an especially large man but it's almost impossible to use them without unnecessary contact. Sit-down toilets seem to be 'designed' by people who have no idea about their use by men.

A fun variation on sit-down toilets is when they're automatic and tuned such that they flush if you lean forward.

AKA Poseidon's Kiss. Thank god I never had the misfortune of having to use one of those...

>unnecessary contact

Took me a moment to realize you were referring to The Witch's Kiss. And yes, I fully agree on all points.

I wonder how many pounds of feces and gallons of urine are breathed in because of the Dyson airblade and similar dryers.

(and when I thought that was a peak bottom design, they made blowers integrated in the faucet, to blow around all the yuck from the sink.)

After 3 pints the design does not matter much...

came here to say this... I'd wager more urine ends up on the floor due to accuracy than urinal design. Still... glad they are focused on some of life's most difficult problems

Yeah, but at that point your pee is beer.

brother if you can’t drink three pints and still keep it in a urinal, you shouldn’t be drinking three pints.

urinals are not small targets.

Ants have recently invaded the men's room at my office where the first floor is dug in a meter below ground level. They are loving the section in front of the urinals where the diabetics have left an ample food supply.

Sitting would be preferable if the savages lifted seats to urinate and more toilet bowls shapes were steeper. A surprise dip in the devil's fondue is enough to make fella want to remove it and leave it there.

Do they really use 90% less water cleaning the floors of women's restrooms than men's currently? Cause that's one implication of the 'new design will save cleaning' claim. Places with public restrooms that I'm familiar with seem to get their floors mopped with identical frequency (and similar apparent rigor) regardless of whether they have urinals or not.

This seems to be an engineered-only solution without real world testing.

A person teetering wildly 3 feet above are still going to miss that narrow design. Or you have to hover and let your pants touch the rim, which also probably puts you closer to the inevitable splash back.

The only clear solution is to direct all splash back to the user so they can take it with them.

A couple of times I’ve used some ancient urinals that look more like a wall with a drain at the bottom. Seems like a much better design? The second picture:

https://www.stainlessrestorations.co.nz/before-after-cleanin...

I hope when they do their testing they cover a diverse age range. Um, it’s not the same when you get older. ;p

Also real world installation. I am an average height dude, but have encountered several urinals which are barely useable. No idea how shorter men or children are supposed to operate them.

I thought this was a solved problem?

https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/02/a-look-back-at-past-emergi...

I've actually made a joke for years that we're gonna put boots on mars before we figure out how to not piss on our pants. I've been trying to ask Elon on Twitter to design a urinal for years as a joke. This is amazing.

Why doesn’t Dyson create a vacuum urinal? We could use that for space stations anyway.

Total addressable market for space station lavatories is pretty small I reckon

Usage time and throughput

We have the Fountaine at work, and it works just fine, as long as you don’t aim towards the fly but instead aim towards the drain hole of the water at the bottom.

Funny btw, if you hold the flush button too long, the entire thing overflows.

Put a grill drain in the floor under the porcelain as the Victorians did.

Pee drains still smell bad and require extra cost to plumb more drains.

Nasty urinals are a compounding problem as the grosser the bathroom the further people stand from the urinal which means the aim is worse and the bathroom gets worse.

You know the saying, an oz of prevention…

You already need bathroom floor drains in most commercial facility bathrooms because code. Might as well make it do something useful.

Yeah, I was meaning commercial, not home. Home, just sit down and manipulate your dong so it can't miss! Well, mostly.

Most urinals in Japan look like the "Nautilus" design already.

I haven't been to Japan and just looked at some photos and it seems they are different than the design proposed in the paper. The paper shows a much more angular "V" shaped cross-section with steep sides ending in a point vs a rounded back where splashes occur.

Why can't we go back to the (what I now know after Googling) is the Kohler Derry or something along those lines?

We had them in middle and high school and while I understand they might not be ideal for the inebriated or exceptionally careless you could piss anywhere in them as hard as you wanted without splash back.

Decades later I encountered one in a maintenance facility nestled in the corner of maintenance shop, obviously not a code compliant install, spare me the hand wringing) and casually mentioned that I didn't know they still made them like that and was told that this is the 3rd facility it has been installed in, the guys like it enough to uninstall it and reinstall it each time.

A picture for anyone else curious what a Kohler Derry looks like.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/101034470@N04/52044489934/

What direction do you use that from?

May be it's the angle, but it looks a little too closer to a toilet bowl than a urinal.

Occasional spills are probably easier to manage compared to a misunderstanding over it's purpose.

Too much risk of lower deckers

Can I get one at home? Seriously - I just painted our bathroom and it's just disgusting how much splashing winds up splashing out of the bowl and onto other surfaces.

just sit down. nobody will know, except your bathroom will be cleaner, you will be cleaning less and gfs will consider you more civilized.

also, both hands free for phone.

Yeah. I joined the sit-to-pee club after I started having to clean my own bathroom and toilet. It really is a win-win-win

With an enlarged prostate, I find it much easier to pee standing up than sitting down.

that mileage varies

Agreed. I have a wife and two daughters. Out of respect for them I sit (or camp hover) and thus they don't have to wade through my piss splatter. Even if I lived by myself I'd still do it for the sake of not wanting my pee all over my own bathroom.

also, both hands free for phone

That really depends on the design at both sides.

Edit: Otherwise, it's a civilized way to do it and nothing to be ashamed of. Men who think it's not manly can go clean their toilet again.

> just sit down. nobody will know...

People don't stand pee because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient.

> just sit down. nobody will know...

People don't pee standing because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient. Only those over 50 or so by now grew up with that stigma.

It's only more convenient if someone else does the cleaning.

Without being too crude, there's still cleaning to be done even after sitting down. Body hair doesn't pick itself up.

even in spring with my winter coat, i don't shed much, but your point is well taken

unless the flag of this enlightened masculinity you are flying means "real men leave the door open", it is still true, nobody will know.

There's no flag. Saying "nobody will know" in thus context implies that one would care if they did know. Thus, my response.

Standing is drastically more time efficient. You just have to look at the snaking queues at the women’s restroom compared to the men’s in any particularly busy public space.

Who wants to bother with undoing their pants just to pee?

I have a theory that it's much worse now in smartphone world. But I don't suppose anyone studied the queue lengths pre-smartphone.

And... Try having a stool, like a one-step folding stool under the feet while sitting. Drastically changes the experience for the better while sitting. There was a post on HN long time ago on it with research on it. It aligns more with how the body is designed to preform the other need for elimination, and my suspicion is it applies to the first category of elimination too.

How would one clean the inside of the "Cornucopia" design?

yeah im not putting my dingdong in that cornucopia

This is a valid concern, as a stranger you can't know if this design doesn't have a surprise. And then there's this potential contact point at the bottom of V.

Same thought, and great example of design that only works in a lab.

And once the puddle underneath has formed, everyone else will stand even further back...

argh, just have the back wall recede away from you as it gets lower. tilt it the other way. you could even use a curve.

Since when is this a new design? Looks the same as a lot of existing designs.

I love the environmental savings BS.

Cleaning a floor with urine on it uses a certain amount of water, no matter what. You can get away with cleaning it less often, but you can’t get away with using 90% less water!

I’m with you. Being able to maintain sanitary facilities with less effort is justification enough. The amount of water used to mop a floor doesn’t vary by how much urine spills.

At least they didn’t try to make a carbon impact pitch.

If you clean the floors 10 times less often you can.

They should've called it the Tesla Cyberinal.

Not patentable, there's prior art of blocky, angular Tesla brand products that people pee on.

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