Logistics Magic: This Water Bottle Could Save Lives, Keep Soldiers Out of Harms Way

high storage density water bottle keeps US Army Soldiers safer

“The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…” 
– Sun Tzu

Among IcePlate’s® various redeeming features, space efficiency remains at the top of the list. IcePlates® nestle together, eliminating wasted space, and maximizing cube utilization. When water is mission critical and not easily accessible, optimizing the transport of potable water equates to saved time and money for your team. To illustrate this more effectively, we’ll compare the cube utilization of IcePlate® to bottled water.

For simplicity’s sake, we are going to make several assumptions:
  • We won’t take into account the space lost by the containers themselves (those are considered usable space in our calculations).
  • We will also disregard the space lost immediately surrounding the caps.
  • We are assuming neither the IcePlates® nor the bottled water are sub-packaged.

Let’s imagine that we are transporting drinking water in a 10 foot Conex shipping container with internal dimensions of 9 '3" x 7 '8" x 7 '10" (111” x 92” x 94”) - 959,928 cubic inches.

Case #1: How Many IcePlates®?

Let’s start by calculating how many 10” x 12” x 1” IcePlates® will fit in said shipping container. There are a multitude of configurations, but for simplicity’s sake, we will stack the IcePlates® one on top of the other, with the long edge of the IcePlate® lining up with the 9 foot internal side of our shipping container. Nine IcePlates® can line up on that wall with 3” of space left over. Nine IcePlates® can also line up in the opposite direction, with 2” of leftover space. Because IcePlate® is only 1” thick, we can fit 94 IcePlates® stacked on top of each other to reach our height of 94”. Simple math 9 IcePlates® by 9 IcePlates® x 94 IcePlates® leave us with 7,614 IcePlates®. We still have two zones of leftover space though. On one edge, we have 3” x 90” x 94” and on the other we have 2” x 111” x 94”.  Let’s look at the first section. With 3”, we can get 3 additional IcePlates® lined up on their sides.  Ten IcePlates® will fit along the 90” edge and 7 along the 94” wall - 210 IcePlates® (with 3” x 90” x 10” leftover - space for 21 more IcePlates® with only 180 cubic inches lost). We have one more section to work with though - 2” x 111” x 94”.  We can get 2 IcePlates® x 9 IcePlates® x 9 IcePlates® (162 total) with 1,452 cubic inches of space leftover.

Total IcePlates: 8,007
Total Water Storage: 400,350 oz.

 

Case #2: How Many Bottled Waters?

In an effort to compare apples to apples, we will use a 50.7 ounce bottle of Smart Water with a height of 11.5” and a diameter of 3.5”, which has a volume of 110.6 cubic inches. A rectangular prism of the same dimensions (3.5” x 3.5” x 11.5”) has a volume of 140.9 cubic inches. Roughly 22% of the space is not utilized when you have bottled water lined up edge to edge because of the curvature nature of the design. Let’s now do our same calculations assuming one bottle can fit in the rectangular prism dimensions above and that the bottles must be stacked upright and on top of each other. In our 111” x 92” x 94” 10 foot Conex shipping container, 31 bottles will fit along the 9 foot edge (with 2.5” of leftover space), 26 bottles will fit along the other wall (with 1” of leftover space), and we can stack 8 bottles high (with 2” of extra space) resulting in 6,448 bottles of water. We have three areas of leftover space - 2.5” x 91” x 94” and 1” x 111” x 94” and 2” x 108.5” x 91” (51,566 cubic inches). Taking into account the lost space from the curvature of the water bottles, a significant amount of space utilization is wasted.

Total Bottles of Water: 6,448
Total Water Storage: 326,914 oz.

Cube Utilization: 74.3%


TLDR

IcePlate® Classics

Cube Utilization: 99.8%.

Water Bottles

Cube Utilization: 74.3%

As we envision new transport and design philosophies, from both an environmental and economic standpoint, space utilization must be a factor in our ever expanding, increasingly cost efficient world. IcePlate’s® modular design allows flexible configurations that ultimately result in higher cube utilization and transport savings.


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