Many years ago, few operators would go into the fill room and weigh bottles to get them ready for a frustrating and inefficient filling process. It required many hours to weigh every bottle and carefully segregate them into weight ranges.

The day afterward, the staff would set up the Mag-Particle fill process and kept the mixture churning while filling. After each fill, they would weigh the bottle and hope that they’re within spec. If not, a wasted fill.

They asked me to design a smarter, less wasteful solution.

Before starting my professional engineering career, I had a business called “Creative Water /// Sights” (CW///S), building water sculptures with copper, stainless steel, and other materials. Water is my passion, then and now. In fact, my knowledge of how water behaves comes from building many sculptures and what I had built at Walt Disney Imagineering for the Disney parks’ special effects. With that, plus my engineering practices, I was able to solve this challenge.

I created a process that included designing and developing a pump/valve skid, tanks, mixer, and a flow-through reservoir. By developing this process, the fill crew was able to eliminate the pre-weighting of all bottles and reduce sampling by over 95%. This resulted in huge cost savings for the company and better operator experience.

Funny how skills developed from completely different industries and personal passions enable truly outside-the-box thinking.