I am a crazy designer by trade and I have given this issue a great bit of thought over the years. The solutions that I have come up with or have found are not easy. Unfortunately, most of them are quite ugly as well.
Most of the surge devices don't remove water as fast as it is dumped in so in many cases you need an unused area above the standard water line to allow for the water to rise. That's good for commercial aquariums and people that have a lot of money time and space but it won't fit in my living room. More power to those that have more room to play with. I do have a 2 gallon dump bucket ATS above the tank but the splash is anemic. We are talking about large volume flow here.
I hope to peel off only part of the problem and try to address that. I want to use a single large pump to do the work along with a water flow switch.
I want to keep zooplankton alive in an NPS tank so I came up with a couple of non-traumatic pump designs but that is not very important for most reefers and I won't explore them here.
Looking around the net, I saw that one engineer made this flow switch. This is a small version of what I wanted to build. Actually there are other switch designs that may work a lot better but this was the first one that I saw, many years ago. This is here just to explain the concept even though it was briefly mentioned earlier in the thread. With new 3-D printing many other designs are becoming feasible.
This project would require scaled up sizes and volumes in the design.
I wanted to double the flow ports so that the pump could have pushed and pulled at the same time. The core would have looked something like this. I added this graphic that I modeled back then only to give you an idea of what I had in mind many years ago.
This graphic shows how water is pushed and pulled at the same time.
In this graphic, I show three pumps of different sizes (Bottom Left) that could be used together but I would just use one. The water flows through the single pump (Blue) and splits to go (Up) through the left side of the switch. Depending on where you are in the cycle, the water goes through the open side (O) and is held back on the other side (-). The open side goes to one side of the tank and the close to the other. The red side opens to pull at the same time so as to get better push/pull flow. Then everything smoothly slows, goes neutral and then reverses.
On the reef, I see (mostly on television) that there are lots of different cycle times on different reefs and/or different parts of the same reef and/or on different days. Given this freedom, I plan to have a longer cycle time of perhaps somewhere between 15 to 30 seconds total including dead time.
As stated earlier in the thread, there is a time when the switch is in transition and energy is wasted but on the other hand, the switching changes gradually, gracefully and naturally "¦ at least in my imagination! You would have to weigh out whether ramping the pump up and down would save money over keeping the speed of the pump constant.
As for true laminar flow, I have looked at clear Plexiglas boxes at either end that run from front to back and from top to bottom but only 2 inches wide with different openings, including straws and a million other ideas "¦well maybe 50. I have looked at larger diameter clear tubing with outboard cowling, a little like the front of airliner fan jets. I have even looked into the patents for super soakers and Dyson bladeless fans. I designed and had built a similar structure before his but with a different purpose. There are lots of ideas but again, most are ugly.
I will tag along because I am more of a designer and a dreamer than a doer. At work, others actually produce my designs. At home I get very little done so I will be glad to see what you guys and gals can come up with and actually build.
