Weber State professor helps eliminate urinal splashback with smarter design
OGDEN, Utah — Researchers estimate more than one million liters of urine splashes onto public bathroom floors daily in the United States.
Randy Hurd, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Weber State University, helped come up with a more sanitary solution. It’s called the Cornucopia and the Nautilus, which are two new urinal designs that reduce splashback to just 1.4% of the typical model.
Hurd worked with a WSU student and a team from University of Waterloo in Canada on the research. Their results were recently published in PNAS Nexus, a peer-reviewed journal by the National Academy of Sciences.
“The solution is actually extremely elegant,” Hurd said. “It’s seemingly simple, but it involved a lot of math to get there.” 
The key, Hurd said, was understanding a correlation between splatter and impact angle — something not taken into consideration during the design of urinals for hundreds of years.
He and fellow researcher Zhao Pan were initially inspired while they were graduate students together. They wanted to work on something that interests and impacts many people’s daily lives, which led them to urinals. They began the research when they were students and, more recently, revisited their findings to propose design improvements.
Hurd used tools like buckets, hoses, and high-speed cameras. He quantified splashback at different angles to come up with new urinal plans that significantly limit splatter.
The solution has the power to not only improve personal hygiene, but also save on cleaning costs and reduce the amount of time, water, and chemicals used to maintain public bathrooms.
“It’s going to be a case study I use for the rest of my career,” Hurd said. “It shows that if you study a problem and figure out what the crux is, you can design something great.”
Rachel Badali, news coordinator
801-626-7362, rachelbadali@weber.edu- Contact:
Rachel Badali, news coordinator
801-626-7362, rachelbadali@weber.edu