Famous actor and director Orson Wells may not have tasted any wine before its time during the endorsement phase of his career. Wine connoisseurs, however, know you can improve the taste of some wines by “opening” them–infusing the wine with air. Most aerators on the market use the venturi effect to aerate the wine. But what if a different process could aerate wine better? Aleksey Matyushev and Kevin Russell, founders of Ottermatics, a Florida-based design firm, asked that question and began a quest to find new answers.

Drawing on their aircraft aerodynamics and hydrodynamics experience, they created an aerator that made use of a turbulating effect (slowing it down and tossing it) — rather than relying on accelerating it.

Matyushev and Russell also wanted to eliminate the need for the user to hold the wine aerator while pouring, as well as the common problem of having wine leaking from the aerator. A further design requirement for the duo was to have the solution be part of the pouring process and as effortless as possible for the user.

While they had the theory down on how to turbulate a liquid, they were not sure which internal arrangement of triangles would offer the best effect. The expensive option would be to construct a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) model and perform a fluid dynamics analysis on various iterations of the design. However, even this technique offered no way of tasting the results – which in this case is the most important factor.

The answer for the internal arrangement of the aerator lay in rapid prototyping. The approach was to start with what they thought the internal arrangement of the triangle turbulators should be, 3D print a prototype, taste it and then iterate. Additive manufacturing allowed them to not only produce many design iterations quickly, but physically test each one with definitive results. Traditionally, this process would have required a lot of time and money spent creating molds to build “gut” designs, and iterate from there.

To keep costs down, and given that the model was small and did not require any special type of material or process, they took advantage of their in-house Solidoodle 4 3D printer. However, for more complex models requiring materials and part sizes they can’t handle, they would normally outsource those parts to a supplier with commercial printers. With the size, low resolution and precision requirements for these prototypes, they were able to print out an iteration in 45 min, do a tasting, re-arrange the internal triangles using CAD in 10 min and be ready to start printing again. It was a day’s worth of work to go through six iterations and find the winning design — not to mention taste a lot of wine.

After just nine iterations, the winning design was taken to a renowned wine bar and put against a sophisticated acrylic aerator which has been dominating the market for some time. In a blind taste test, all the wine aficionados chose the wine aerated by the 3D printed prototype over the competition.

If Matyushev and Russell had gone the traditional (and complicated) route of using a CFD model, it would have taken about five hours to analyze the design, followed by each iteration. For consumer products like this that have no existing science off of which to base the design, even with sophisticated CFD analysis tools they would still have been guessing at the end. 3D printing helped them quickly create a winning internal arrangement of the aerator, which could then easily be made ready for real market tasting.

Without additive manufacturing, the 2 day process would have involved a $700 tooling commitment and a delay of almost 2 weeks to receive the final design and actually test it.

Ottermatics

www.ottermatics.com

RP Marketplace, LLC

www.rpmarketplace.com