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Steam Ahead AA V10 PDF
Steam Ahead AA V10 PDF
FULL
STEAM
AHEAD
Startup Nebia is poised to transform the experience of taking a shower.
While developing its innovative new showerhead, the company’s engineers
made thermal improvements to ensure that a shower, using much less water
than average, would be warm and comforting.
By Gabriel Parisi-Amon, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer, and Corey Lynn Murphey, Mechanical Engineer,
Nebia Inc., San Francisco, USA
O
ften, protecting the environ- nozzles in jet engines and agricultural compromising the quality of the bath-
ment means making some sort equipment, delivers water in very fine ing experience.
of personal sacrifice — taking droplets — cutting water consumption He and his father, Emilio, a retired
time to sort your recyclables, making dramatically, while creating a comfort- engineer, came up with a few early
the effort to walk or ride a bike, carrying ing, enveloping warm cloud. It is a truly prototypes of an atomizing shower-
reusable grocery bags along with you. revolutionary idea that has the power to head capable of producing an ultrafine
Nebia was founded to deliver a per- change the way people around the world mist of water. To perfect and commer-
sonal benefit alongside an environmen- take showers every day. cialize that idea, Carlos recruited a
tal benefit. The company’s innovative management team that included Gabriel
showerhead not only reduces the water A DROPLET OF INNOVATION Parisi-Amon and Philip Winter. Parisi-
consumed during a typical shower by 70 TAKES SHAPE Amon’s experience was in managing
percent, but it also delivers an improved The concept behind Nebia was the product supply chain at Apple,
personal experience that early users are inspired by co-founder Carlos Gomez while Winter had worked on delivering
describing as “transformative.” Andonaegui, a fitness club execu- clean-water technologies to develop-
The company’s name comes from the tive in Mexico. In 2010, Carlos wanted ing countries. With the right blend of
Italian word nebbia, which translates to to reduce the water consumed by expertise in place, Nebia was officially
“fog” or “mist.” Nebia’s groundbreaking the 20,000 people showering in his founded in 2013.
showerhead technology, inspired by the company’s clubs every day, without
head prototypes, testing them and then each of these factors played a role
creating new prototypes. Not only was in managing thermal loss. But these
that process expensive, but it was also design aspects also affected other criti-
very time-consuming. It might take cal aspects of the shower experience, so might retain thermal energy more effec-
weeks for new parts to arrive, for those the company’s engineering team had to tively, but it might hit a human body
parts to be assembled, and for a new make a series of design trade-offs. with too much force to maintain the
design to be exhaustively tested. For example, a larger droplet size fog-like effect the brand is based on. It
might also consume too much water to
meet Nebia’s aggressive water-conser-
vation targets. Similarly, a high water
velocity might reduce heat loss, but
deliver adverse results in other perfor-
mance areas.
The Nebia product development
team combined its ANSYS thermal-loss
simulation data with experiential infor-
mation collected by human test sub-
jects — blending the quantitative with
the qualitative. This enabled engi-
neers to achieve the right balance of
water temperature, flow rates and direc-
Nebia’s patent-pending H2MICRO nozzle array — designed using ANSYS software — is housed in a high-density polymer head. tions, droplet patterns and sizes, and
other characteristics to create the ideal