How a group of Ont. university students built a better, cleaner urinal

Waterloo university students design cleaner urinal UW students create new urinal designs that aims to combat splash-back. CTV’s Tyler Kelaher explains.

A group of engineering students from the University of Waterloo have come up with a new design they say will make for cleaner urinals in public washrooms.

The current design of most urinals can be unsanitary and sometimes downright disgusting.

“You go in and the floor is sticky, it’s not great,” says Kaveeshan Thurairajah, one of the students involved in the project. “As soon as you start to get a little splash, people start to distance themselves and that leads to more splash.”

Public urinals have had the same design for decades, with most causing a splash or rebounding spray that ends up on the floor, walls, or on the user.

The UW students believe there is a scientific solution to the problem.

First they learned about how much mess a classic urinal can make.

“We measure both the patterns the droplets made when they come out, but we also measure the actual mass of droplets that are escaping the urinal,” explains Thurairajah.

The students determined, using slow motion video, the shape of a basic urinal and the angle of stream can cause droplets to spray up to half-a-metre away.

“You want a urinal that is going to give that critical impact angle no matter what the user does,” says Thurairajah. “That’s what our designs are going to do. Rather than just aiming on a regular urinal, we’re optimizing the urinal as a whole.”

Thurairajah and the other students say their design has already caught the attention of retail giant Target and they are considering using the urinals in their stores. The group, however, hasn’t yet moved towards mass production.

Besides overall cleanliness, the students say the new urinal design will cut costs and prevent wasted resources.