Purist Hydroflo Water Bottle
Housewares, Retail & Consumer Products Award
Brand Owner: Specialized Bicycle Components
Designer: Harbor Fluid Products
Machinery Manufacturer: Various
Materials: Harbor Fluid Products
Molder: Harbor Fluid Products
Moldmaker: Harbor Fluid Products
Product Description:
The Purist Hydroflo bottle uses patent-pending or proprietary processes to create performance features that cannot otherwise be combined in a single product. The bottle offers the flexibility, light weight, mechanical safety, and impact resistance of plastic with the chemical safety and cleanability of glass. Specifically, the bottle is extremely soft and flexible, making it freezer friendly and easy to squeeze. Yet, its silicon dioxide surface treatment keeps it dishwasher safe and its contents chemically pure. With a simple rinse, this surface treatment also ensures that water from the bottle does not taste like plastic or the previous liquid, and does not absorb even trace amounts of chemicals from the plastic. Similarly, the dual action valve offers the seemingly-contradictory attributes of high flow, spill-proofing, positive actuation, and pleasing tactility. It is based on a very low durometer silicone slit valve and a higher durometer TPE linear valve insert molded into a single piece. The low-durometer slit valve prevents spills and provides high flow, while the higher durometer linear valve ensures ideal tactile feel and leak-proof actuation. These features are packaged in a product that has a uniquely grip-able 3-sided geometry and flexible ergonomic overmolding in critical areas.
Why is the product innovative?
There are three major innovations reflected in the purist hydroflo bottle. The first is the silicone dioxide coating process that gives the flexible bottle its glass-like purity. Silicon dioxide is an inert compound found in apples, oranges, cucumbers, and celery, as well as beach sand. As a coating, it forms a low surface tension barrier, which shields the inside of the bottle from odor, staining, and mold build-up. This coating is applied using a proprietary molecular diffusion process. In this process, silicon dioxide is infused into the polymer structure of the inner surface of the bottle, forming a protective glass-like barrier that prevents odors, stains, and mold from permanently attaching to the inside surface of the bottle. This layer is so thin, much less than a human hair, that it remains flexible under the most extreme conditions. The efficacy of this coating has been independently verified by SGS Laboratories. This bottle also employs a patent-pending insert molding technology for integrating very low durometer components into much higher durometer multi-component molded parts. This unique ability to combine disparate durometers, and even incompatible materials, enables the slit valve and linear valve portions of the poppet to be made from materials that could not otherwise be combined into a single part. A slit valve made from a very low durometer silicone will flow well and be easy to open, while still preventing spills. However, thermoplastic elastomers will not stick to silicone and low durometer slit valves are too flexible to be mechanically captured in a traditional insert molding process, so existing applications of silicone slit valves, such as ketchup bottles, require the slit valve to be physically held in place by a rigid plastic retaining ring. In a water bottle this would represent an unacceptable choking hazard, since optimal user comfort demands that the poppet be molded from an elastomer. The novel insert molding process used here overcomes this problem by capturing the soft silicone slit valve securely in a flexible 1-piece TPE poppet without a separate rigid retainer. Lastly, the geometry of the linear valve improves upon existing water bottle valves by being significantly easier to pull open, yet less prone to opening inadvertently when the bottle is squeezed. Conventional bottle valves form a seal between the poppet ID and the OD of a center post. When the user grabs or bites the end of the poppet, this geometry creates additional friction that makes the poppet hard to open. Because this new poppet seals around its OD to the Cap ID, gripping the poppet does not increase required opening force. This seal geometry also means that pressure increases in the bottle due to squeezing or impact exert much less force on the poppet than in existing bottle products, making it much less likely to open inadvertently. This bottle functions so well that Cycling News declared it “hands-down the best bottle currently available” and Gear Junkie.com named it to their 2011 Top 10 Gear of the Year list.
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