When I was young student in Moscow State University, between 1954 and 1960, I was thinking about great future projects. (Remember, the first human satellite was launched on October 4, 1957, when I was a student.) With the years, however, I became wiser and began to look at Earth's every day problems. In the autumn of my years, I looked at such important problems as how to improve oil refining or how purify water fast and cheap.
My hygienic toilet is a spin-off from vortex technology I explored in my oil-refining work. Because, after analyzing the situation with toilets, I came to the conclusion that they're not adequate at all -- especially when we look at hospitals and other public places. How many people have you met who would say that they are satisfied with public toilets? Those who are in hospitals suffer every day from possible contamination and worsening of their condition from something they can not clearly see and predict.
Toilets are, as a rule, dirty practically everywhere. Everybody knows about this, but somehow it is assumed that there is nothing we can do to stop from being covered with splashes. Statistics tell us that only 10% of people actually sit on the toilet seat in a public bathroom. Two reasons: seats are dirty, and if we squat, we think that fluids from a toilet bowl are at greater distance from the bowl to our underthings.
How wrong we are. Most people do not know that there is a cumulative effect, explained by fluid dynamics, that even small droplets can cause quite a big splash -- so big that it can hit our underthings and saturate the surrounding air with evaporations.
Below I will describe a patented hygienic toilet I have developed that could eliminate the risk of contamination. This toilet has special features for water flow optimization that allow the maximum detergency of a toilet bowl with minimum amount of water.
1. Toilet bowl, splashes, reflections, aerosols.
First, let us look at general problem of the interaction between your evacuations and the toilet water and the bowl surface. In the simple case, water droplets (or any other liquid, like urine) falling on a water surface represent quite an interesting phenomenon: a falling droplet, when it deforms on a water surface, is applied at an area much larger than a droplet's diameter, with the maximum intensity at a droplet's center. As a result, there is observed on the water surface an expanding cavity which then collapses, developing a cumulative splash. The mass of a splash exceeds a droplet's mass by several times, and it propagates for quite a long height -- 1.5 to 2 meters.
If a droplet or a liquid flow is directed at a certain angle to a water surface, an oblique cumulative jet develops, directed toward the initial motion of a droplet. This effect explains why men urinating into urinals get their legs covered with reflected liquid!
2. Toilet-related health problems.
In the endnotes below, you'll find a series of articles that address the problem of possible contamination caused by toilets. The works consider that bacteria and viruses seeded into toilets remain in the toilet for a long time after multiple flushing and even cleanings with antibacterial fluids. In some cases, salmonella bacteria survived after seeding in the toilet bowl for up to fifty days.
Some germs die almost immediately after they're exposed to dry atmosphere. Some survive longer. But many germs can survive and multiply extensively in humid air and wet areas -- especially under a toilet bowl's rim. And before germs expire, they can be transmittable and infectious. Germs can infect wounds on human body, as well as wet and opened places such as anal and vaginal areas.
3. Financial consequences of toilet related health problems.
The consequences may be enormous. Urinary incontinence, salmonellosis, and venereal diseases cost the US over 30 billion dollars yearly, according to statistics.
4. Hygienic toilet without splashes and reflections and with low water consumption.
Modern physics and fluid mechanics indicate several ways for elimination of splashes when liquid droplets contact liquid or solid surfaces.
The best approach is the utilization of toilet bowl walls and a water surface covered with a substance would not reflect incident particles or liquids back to a toilet user. A good candidate for such a substance is foam, especially a foamy disinfecting soap and its compositions.
The use of foam-generating equipment was until recent times cumbersome and time consuming. However, the latest advances in the development of self-foaming devices that are inexpensive and simple make this problem easy to solve.
In such a toilet, flushed water moves in a converging-expanding bowl's exit channel with a supersonic speed of surface waves -- without atomizing liquid.
The toilet design and operation described above provides the best washing effect with low noise and with minimum of consumed water.
We hope that this short article can help to find a company or people who would be interested in fabricating the hygienic toilet to help the millions of people suffering from health problems, toilet phobia, as well as those who just want to be clean during and after coming to a toilet.
J. Barker and M.V. Jones, "The potential spread of infection caused by aerosol contamination of surfaces after flushing a domestic toilet", Journal of Applied Microbiology 2005, 99, pp 339--347.
J. Barker, S.F. Bloomfield, "Survival of Salmonella in bathrooms and toilets in domestic homes following salmonellosis", Journal of Applied Microbiology, v 89, No 1, July 2000, pp 137-144.
Ignatius T.S. Yu, M.B., B.S., M.P.H., Yuguo Li, Ph.D., Tze Wai Wong, M.B., B.S., Wilson Tam, M.Phil., Andy T. Chan, Ph.D., Joseph H.W. Lee, Ph.D., Dennis Y.C. Leung, Ph.D., and Tommy Ho, B.Sc., "Evidence of Airborne Transmission of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Virus", The New England Journal of Medicine, V 350, No 17, p. 1731-1739, 2004.
S. Strauss, P. Sastry, C. Sonnex, S. Edwards and J. Gray, "Contamination of environmental surfaces by genital human papillomaviruses", Sexually Transmitted Infections, 2002; No 78, pp. 135-138.
5. Optimization of bowl geometry for fast water motion.
Another way of making a toilet with enhanced hygienic qualities is to improve the efficiency of water detergency during flushing using specially-designed bowl geometry. Our estimation of obtaining an optimum efficiency of water detergency shows that, in order to utilize a vortex flow that provides high detergency, there are certain hydrodynamic phenomena and geometrical factors that must be applied to a bowl design. Our analysis, which is based on application of the "shallow water" theory and the gas-hydraulic analogy, makes it possible to design a toilet bowl with fast rotation of water that creates a "supersonic" velocity of surface waves. (See our patent here [1].)
6. General conclusions.
Flushing water or any other liquid that moves from bowl rim holes with a high enough velocity develops a vortex flow that provides maximum washing effect, cleaning the toilet bowl surface and completely removing evacuations.