A First-of-Its-Kind Safety Blanket

WRAPTOR BLANKET

Water under intense pressure isn’t just dangerous—it can be lethal. If something goes wrong when connecting buildings to water mains, injuries and deaths can happen.

Brett Trout, president of Wraptor Inc., knows this all too well. He’s been selling commercial-grade PVC pipes, such as those used in water mains and sewers, for almost 30 years.

“They drill a hole in the pipe and take the service line to the building,” he says. “If there is trapped air or deflection in the line, the thing can explode. It can kill someone with sharp shards of PVC.”

Trout was called to do a tapping safety presentation at a location where a pipe blew up. The explosion put an employee in the intensive care unit for a month, leaving him disabled. “That bothered me enough that I said, ‘Something needs to be done,’” Trout says.

Existing PVC pipe regulations recommend putting a blanket with a hole over the pipe while tapping into it. But the guidance is not very specific, and a normal household blanket is not up to the task. The question, Trout says, is what kind of blanket would work and where could contractors obtain it? He could not find a product, so he decided to come up with his own solution.

Trout’s wife, Jennifer Merrell, has worked as a liaison between tech companies and higher education, and she suggested he call Rose-Hulman Ventures to help design the product. “They helped design a tapping safety blanket from beginning to end,” Trout says. “It’s being field-tested right now, and is already being well-accepted in the industry.”

He says the blanket is 44 inches long by 36 inches wide, and is made of several materials developed or suggested and tested by Rose-Hulman Ventures.

Trout verified the blanket’s strength independently, to avoid any risk involved in blowing up PVC pipe on campus. “It has been tested up to 1,000-psi burst test,” he says. “It can absorb one heck of a blast.” Check out a video demonstration here.

Development began last summer and was done by November. It’s been patented and will launch in April as the only safety blanket of its kind on the market.

The process of working with Rose-Hulman Ventures impressed Trout. “Gage Wilkinson was the main lead, but has all these interns,” he says, adding that Rose-Hulman’s student interns brought a lot of value to the project. “I remember a specific intern named Grace Trask. I would hire her today. She created a spreadsheet that I still use, and this was a kid in college.”

He plans to work with Rose-Hulman Ventures again, to develop another version of the blanket for even larger pipes.

Trout encourages anyone with a great product idea to follow their dream—and reach out to Rose-Hulman Ventures if they need help making it a reality. “It doesn’t cost too much and they love what they do,” he says. “If you can’t develop it on your own, someone like RHV is there to take it to the next level.”