Wave Grate

Summary brief: Hide dirt and debris. Easy clean. High flow. Low price. High-end style. Quality manufacturing. Soft on bare feet. This brief has never been achieved in combination. The new Wave grate exceeds all these parameters significantly. Patented aperture and manufacturing methods allow high flow. Topside styling allows soft feel. Angled aperture and simple underside allow for easy cleaning. The critical ability to hide debris is achieved with a unique angled intake. The perfect linearity is achieved with the patented manufacturing method. Low price is achieved with high-tech materials and manufacturing techniques.

Designing a grate profile that is perfectly linear, with invisible supports, that can't be seen through, wasn’t the only challenge. How to manufacture such a unicorn is very difficult. The realisation that we can make the grate upside down was the breakthrough. This required custom machinery, extreme tooling, and significant investment. The unique hidden Bernoulli orifice, coupled with our manufacturing method and ability to separate dissimilar metals allowed us to not only patent in Australia, but around the world. The benefits of high performance, aesthetic impact, and benefit to society both economically and sustainably allow design solutions benefiting everyone.

This design represents a new way to design style in linear drainage which can expand into the future with different width, depth, texture, finish, colour, shape, design components, which can combine to address aesthetic, functional, and budgetary concerns. The unique patented design and manufacturing methodology is expandable but retains the key essences of this evolved concept. Accessibility and inclusiveness doesn’t need to look institutional. In this design affordable luxury assists access and inclusiveness. This design has employed design thinking to take a niche solution to the masses, rather than compromising a mass solution to a niche.

Achieve high flow. Liquid water can be moved by utilising one of three ways, gravity, pressure, surface tension. The Wave takes advantage of all three. The shape of the aperture at the surface takes advantage of the behaviour of waters’ surface tension. By having a narrower aperture at the top, the surface tension of slow moving water ‘grabs’ either side of the aperture, drawing the water into the aperture. The aperture continues to expand before contracting again slightly. As the water moves into the expander section it draws more down with it. Bernoulli’s Law determines the water will speed up as it loses pressure moving through the smaller aperture. Thus using the triple combination of effects on water the Wave achieves a relatively high flow for such a narrow aperture grating. How to make metal feel soft. Gratings of metal can be uncomfortable on wet bare feet. By utilising are wider than normal tynes for the grille, then adding a more organic large radius to the top of each tyne, the feeling on bare feet is as though on a slightly yielding surface, despite the fact it is metal, thus creating a more comfortable surface for the user.