R&D/Leverage work together with Hydranome
With the collaborative contributions of R&D/Leverage UK, ISBM total Solution provider, and PET Power, a plastic bottle producer in the Netherlands, Fred Housheer, entrepreneur from the Netherlands, realised the Hydranome water bottle. This bottle lets the user know how much water they drink daily with the use of an interactive dial on the cap. The dial helps the consumer track the number of times the bottle has been filled and the dots on the lid show the adequate daily intake as well as the progress to meet this intake.
Housheer first found PET Power who helped selecting the material. R&D/Leverage then was contacted by PET Power concerning moulding a bottle from Eastman’s Tritan copolyester material, a resin developed for reusable water bottles. The resin is said to have some unique properties that make it suitable for drinking-water bottles, like being reusable, dishwasher safe, BPA free and of glass-like finish, but it can also be difficult to work with, including the fact that it doesn’t like to be stretched.
One of the challenges R&D/Leverage encountered was the neck diameter (was) smaller than R&D typically likes in relation to the body diameter. “We put some designs together to reduce the stretch ratios and to keep the stretch to a minimum, which would help to keep the clarity good over the whole length of the bottle,” states Steve Gough, technical manager for R&D/Leverage. Hydranome wanted a neck design to accommodate a comfortable drinking position, as well as a heavy weight bottle what required a thick, long preform to provide the weight required for a reusable bottle. Other challenges involved an engraving, date and logo on the bottle. .
The Hydranome is injection stretch blow moulded with single stage tooling, with the preform and bottle on one machine to get optimum results. The tooling was tested in R&D/Leverage’s Product Solutions Laboratory in the UK then transferred to Holland where PET Power had to modify their machine to accommodate the resin, make it more suitable for Tritan. The tooling was completed last September and installed in one of PET Power’s production facilities.
