I was walking by a large sprinkler system and saw the little mechanism that broke up the water spray and wondered if any one knew why it does this? It seems to me to be required for some reason, but I can’t figure it out. The only reason I could think of was to get the water to wet the area closer to the spray, but there seemed to be enough there without the pfft pfft pfft and the break up didn’t seem to spread it out too much.
If it’s a rotating sprinkler, then the little arm that breaks up the spray not only causes water to land closer to the actual sprinkler (instead of it all being shot all the way out to the end of the spray), but the hammering action causes the head to rotate as well.
The thing is lightly spring-loaded, so it always comes to rest in the way of the water spray. When water is flowing, it knocks the arm away, and the spring action causes it to return, only to be knocked away again, ad infinitum (until someone shuts off the water). The hammer is weighted so that the knocking action causes the whole thing to rotate.