Portable Water Bottle Filter with Carbon Cartridge and Infuser
A drink-through bottle filter where the infuser does three jobs at once — flavour, cartridge protection and support for the telescopic breather tube — plus a packable funnel variant.
Two related products in one brief: a filter that turns any standard water bottle into a filtered one, and a compact pour-through funnel filter for travel.
The problem
The bottle filter has to work while someone drinks through it, which makes it a small fluid system rather than a moulded shape:
- Draw path. Water is pulled through an activated carbon cartridge by suction, so flow resistance has to stay low enough to drink comfortably.
- A telescopic breather tube admits air as water leaves — and it is the most fragile part in the assembly. Bottles get dropped.
- The cartridge is consumable and needs protecting when the unit is out of the bottle.
- The funnel variant had a different constraint entirely: fold small enough to be worth packing, and clamp onto kettles, coffee machines and mugs of wildly different sizes.
The approach
- One part, three functions. The infuser sleeve around the cartridge is the key move: it holds tea leaves or fruit when used alone, shields the carbon cartridge from drop damage, and braces the breather tube so it cannot bend or snap. Combining functions removed parts instead of adding them.
- Infuser stays, filter is optional. The architecture lets the user run filter plus infuser together, or infuser alone for flavour — resolved explicitly with the client, because the original concept had them as alternatives.
- Foldable silicone for the funnel so it collapses flat, with a clamp detailed for the range of vessels the user actually owns.
- Food-safe materials throughout, chosen with moulding in mind rather than specified after the fact.
The result
Both concepts modelled and detailed for manufacture across two development rounds, with the multi-function infuser reducing part count in the bottle unit.
Where this applies
Small consumer products where a few millilitres of flow, a fragile part and a cost target all meet. The win is usually one part doing three jobs — but only if you find it before tooling.
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