Protein Skimmers

If we all knew the answers to these questions we would all make ourselves the best skimmers.
Mabye this article proteinskimmer.com on the aqua C website will answer a few of your questions.

Brian

As far as I can tell, a good skimmer requires very little fiddling to get good skimmate consistently. The Remora and bakpak are nicely designed to do that.

If you can get hold of Volume 1 of Sprung and Delbeek's The Reef Aquarium, they go into great detail about what makes a skimmer work well. A balance of flow rate, bubbles of the right size and quantity, and contact time between bubbles and water.

Like Brian, if I understood it better, I'd be making them.

If you want a fairly hardcore mathmatical approach to skimmer theory, check out P.R. Escobal's "Aquatic Systems Engineering" from Dimension Engineering Press. A little biased in some cases (he owns a company that makes filtration equipment, and when he recommends a product, take it with a grain of salt as it's usually the one made by his company ) but a very worthwhile read nonetheless. The only thing I don't like so much about his section on skimmers is that he often talks about what he terms the most "efficient" skimmer design, which so far as I can tell means to him the most skimmate that can be removed per unit volume of air from a given volume of water, or to put it another way, the most protein per bubble. That, as discussed briefly in the article from aqua C posted by Brian, does not neccessarily make the best skimmer for an aquarium application. But the discussions of how and why a skimmer works are good.