The SoCal Local Network were fortunate enough to have a fantastic tour of WET Design in Sun Valley. WET Design was founded by a group of former Disney Imagineers who wanted to design performing fountains. With over 200 installations worldwide, their performances bring together water, fire, ice, fog and lights in spectacular shows such as the Fountains of Bellagio, The Dubai Fountain, or the Cauldron at the Salt Lake City Olympics.
WET Design offers an almost complete turnkey services from concept design and animations through the design and manufacturing of all the fountains and components through to in operations support to keep their systems at peak performance.
Our tour started with a look at the creative process that WET goes through to help come up with the concepts taking into account the history and culture of the locations where their design will be built, which is used to inform the extensive animation process so their clients can understand the possible performances at any time of day from any angle to see what they are buying. There are extensive libraries of research books and material so designers can understand how everything can interact to ensure that the performances they design meet their client’s expectations.
With WET manufacturing nearly everything for their installations, the next step on our tour was a walkthrough of their machine shops where they mill, bend, punch, vacuum form, press, water jet cut and robotic weld all the components that make up their different robotic and non-robotic fountains, jets and shooters. Their machine shop includes a room dedicated to planning manufacturing work with full wall scheduling and models of the manufacturing facility so everybody can see what needs to be done across all projects enhancing production efficiency and ensuring all the deadlines can be met.
As is to be expected from performance pushing designs where building codes do not cover any fountains greater than residential size, the engineering often needs to be from first principles if the designer’s vision is to be supported as so there is no established body of reference work to design from. This requires the engineers to have a solid understanding of engineering principles and an ability to understand the intent of the design codes to help negotiate approvals with the local authorities.
A systems design approach is essential as consideration needs to be given to the inertia of large volumes of water when designing the response times in the control system. To overcome these lags, compressed air is used to move water rather than pumps for the largest shooters projecting 500ft in the air requiring infrastructure to support pressures up to 2000 psi, while in contrast the pressure for the fire elements can be as low as 15 psi. The increasing sizes of installations requiring longer cable runs in turn increases the size of cables to minimize voltage drop, and designers trying to ensure that in the event of a chain of failures the performance is still safe to touch, often find that custom fault current circuit protection is required.
As WET often takes on the responsibility for ongoing maintenance, the design process will create scale models, in which models of maintenance staff can be placed to ensure that everything is accessible and maintainable, especially where maintenance needs to take place underwater. The same modelling and prototyping processes are also used to test new ideas without impacting production of products for installation.
The founders of WET certainly believe in the healthy body, healthy mind approach, with an on-site gym and trainer together with group classes with encouragement for everybody to spend time each working day working out. Continuing education is encouraged with shops where employees can make their own projects as well as help with the wooden large scale mockups of installations, or take apart and re-assemble their fountains and jets to get an appreciation of the design and maintenance requirements which are complemented with learning sessions lead by WET Design employees.
The tour finished with a close up look at some of the fountains and shooters seeing how the different effects could be made by bouncing water off different shaped surfaces to create flame filled spheres, tornados of fire or a fountain that mixes water and fire, that is so safe to touch performers in Las Vegas dance in them.
Altogether this was an outstanding visit made even better for the young professionals that attended by WET Design staff taking the time to discuss opportunities for internships and graduate employment with those that have drought their resumes along.