Ed Nolan, left, VP of Consulting Delivery for MAGNET, looks on as Walter Berry, CEO of American Innovative Products, chats with Dave Pierson (seated), Senior Design Engineer, about the engineering and design of the company's innovative Siphon Flush product that Berry hopes will soon replace the unreliable rubber flapper.

Berry and Pierson look over some of the dozens of design iterations they tried over the course of two years of development.

"At first, I thought we wanted an in-line valve to measure how much water was going in. But we quickly discovered there were too many variables," Berry recalls. "I knew we had to look for the absolute root cause. In the end—the key was to pull the flapper out of the model and force ourselves to think outside the box."

"This application was ripe for evolutionary trend analysis," said Dave Pierson, MAGNET Senior Design Engineer. "I looked at the patent landscape for toilet flappers over the last 50 years. In all that time there had only been Level 1 innovations. This problem called for a Level 5 innovation—a dramatic evolution like that from the block of ice to the electric refrigerator, or from the analog vinyl recording to the digital CD."

Pierson worked with Berry for nine months, going through hundreds of design iterations before hitting on a concept that was both stunningly simple and eminently practical. Berry called it the Siphon Flush.

Think about a submarine. Air makes a submarine go up and down. The siphon flush works on this very principle. The device is a simple reverse trap that blocks the flow of water with an air bubble. (The trap in your kitchen sink blocks the flow of sewer gases back into your house on the same principle.)

The air bubble also keeps the plastic siphon device floating at the top of the tank of water. By depressing the device just slightly, water displaces the air bubble and creates a siphon, pushing water through the toilet. As the water level drops, the plastic siphon also drops, until it hits a predetermined height. Then it stops, and as the water flows away from it, a new air bubble is gulped into the siphon. Water flow is blocked again and the device floats up as the water level in the tank is reestablished.

What blocks the water flow is an air bubble. An air bubble that is replaced at every flush. As a consequence, with the Siphon Flush, there is absolutely nothing that can possibly degrade or leak.

"This is so outside the box its beyond comprehension," remarks Pierson. The design engineer developed dozens of prototypes using many different kinds of tools during the evolution process. He relied on the Goldfire Innovator engineering software package from Boston-based Invention Machine to analyze and adapt ideas from dozens of fields, including life-sciences. The software helped Pierson quickly and efficiently analyze technology trends and materials, validate concepts and anticipate future failure points, saving Berry both time and money during the crucial development phase.

Watch a demo of the Siphon Flush in action (.wmv file will open in its own viewer).

"We went through hundreds of ideas," recalls Berry. "But we would only go one or two steps down the path before we could see it was a dead end. Now Pierson and Berry have one of those working relationships where their ideas spark each other and they can sometimes finish each other's sentences.

"Sometimes I would call Dave with an idea, and he'd say, 'I was just thinking about that. What about this?'" recalls Berry. "This is one of the great things about working with MAGNET. We already have some follow on ideas for aftermarket that we're working on."