If you know anything about waterparks and waterslides...?

Question

If you know anything about waterparks and waterslides please help me answer these questions:

1) How are waves made in a wave pool?

2) How can you make sure waterslides are safe before people ride them?

3) Why is the water always so cold?

4) How would you determine a weight limit for watersildes?

5)How are waterjets made?

Answer 1

1) there are different methods used in wave pools. Some use air, some use mechanical devices, and some use water. Typhoon Lagoon in Florida fills the tank with water and then drop it all at once creating the giant surf wave.

2) watch someone else ride it first. Parks have lifeguards test the slides before the park opens so they should be safe.

3)Not all water parks have cold water.

4) Too fat to fit through the tube.

5) Usually the water is taken in through a larger opening, accelerated using a device like a propellor, and forced out through a smaller opening.

Answer 2

1. As far as I've seen waves in a wave pool are made using huge tanks of compressed air (which can also be taken in from outside) and somehow they use the air pressure to make large waves. I know that Lake Compounce in Bristol CT and King's Dominion in Virginia use these setups for their wave pools.

2. A big safety test is turning on the water and having the water go down the slides. As long as the slides can somehow be viewed by someone (like there's tunnels or something if they're not aboveground) they can check for structural leaks which could further deteriorate and cause a major safety hazard to riders. Another test just starts with quality control and making sure that the slide is the appropriate thickness all around. Of course weight limits for these kinds of rides need to be set up as well, that's another big safety issue.

3. There's 2 reasons why the water is "so cold". One is that the water is outside all of the time so when it's hot it's outside but also when it's cold the water is outside as well so it goes up and down with the temperatures. The other reason is that heating such a thing plus with it being outside it would cost way more money than it's worth. Honestly, who's going to be turned off to the whole amusement park by cold water? Sure it might be a factor at an amusement park that's just a big waterpark but where else are they going to go? All waterparks, whether the main attraction of the park or just part of the park, don't heat their water, it just wouldn't make sense economically for the park.

4. For the water slides there's actually a very easy test that can be performed to determine the weight limits. First you take the average area that a person would be applying their weight to and you put it in a special machine which applies a certain amount of force to it directly proportional to what a real person would weigh. From this they can determine the weight capacity of a certain thickness of whatever material they're using.

5. Waterjets are made by sucking in large amounts of water over a large area with vacuums and then squeezing it out over a small area. If you were to bring in 50 cubic yards of water for a waterfall over a 1 minute period out an opening of 5 square yards you'd have 10 times the force coming out than you had going in.