Effective cleaning stream for water jet / cannon

[dsg1985]

We're designing a washbay for vehicle cleaning using fixed water cannons and a pressurized hose reel arrangement.

Companies are able to supply exit velocities their products will achieve but are unable to provide us with details of the stream we can expect at 10m, 20m, etc and how effective it will be at cleaning. We can obviously work out the pressure that would be applied to a surface given nozzle dimension / flow rate / velocity data at various distances, so if we knew effective cleaning pressures and this sort of data we may be able to make some decisions.

I imagine the water jet will gradually disperse over distance and reduce in velocity due to air resistance, but most often I can't get this information, just what's produced at the nozzle exit.

Does anybody have experience in this sort of application? Am I asking the right questions? (I hope this is the right forum to ask them in, too).

The material to be cleaned off will be oil and mud. I doubt it will be too caked on as they're looking at cleaning the machines daily. We're not looking to polish them to a shine, just clean them for maintenance purposes.

 

[racookpe1978]

Tell your "proposed suppliers" - since they have to sell you something that works - to provide you their own values, or a test nozzle and pressure device, in order to remain on the qualified venders list.

There is no reason to accept "we can't do that" or "we don't have that information" ...

A valid answer is "that is proprietary information" - but then, you can sign a non-disclosure agreement to get the informaiton.