Building 16 laminar jets and animating them with music

Hello guys,

I just wanted to share with you a laminar jets project we did in our french engineering school!!

If your interested you can watch this video we made showing all the design and building process of those jets:


And you can also read the details of the project!

The project took us overall one year to realize, we were around 10 students in the team and we had mainly two big stages.

1)DesignProcess

The design took us two month to realise, we were a lot helped by the forum community and all the different posts showing different builds of laminar jets. We had to do three prototypes to finally come up with one laminar jet fonctionnal and ready to be produced on a bigger scale. The main design difficulty was the outlet nozzle because it was a fondamental part of the jet. With the reynold's number and all of the fluid's mecaniks, we had to make a precise calculation to determine the inside diameter of the nozzle in relationship to the outside width of the jet

2) Production Process
After having finished the first prototypes, we had to find a way to produce 15 others and prepare all of the water circuit, with the pipes, the four water tanks and the electrical wiring of the cutters to the arduino board.
This took us the remaining five month to build. We started by recycling a 200mm diameter pipe by cuting it in 16 pieces of around 500mm of length. With our university's shop, we machined 16 other outlet nozzle on a metal lathe, we also milled the plastic covers of both side of our plastic pipes. We had to use the school's snc machine to create grooves on both side of the cover to completely seal the jets and make sure they were water proof. We finished by adding the cutter system which was created using very thin metal strips attached to some servo's head. Those servos were controlled by a very simple arduino program which made it easy to animate each jet and create an animation with music and water!

If you have any question or more details about our builds, feel free to contact us!

Hi guys,
Your project is great!
Thank you for your report.
I'm now planning to make a cutter with micro servo, but usually servos can be easily damaged by humidity.
Please can you describe the design of your cutter?
Can you also advise the motor model and make?
Any pictures and videos would be greatly appreciated!