Numerical and Experimental Investigation of the Strength of Corrugated Board Packages

Goods that are shipped world-wide travel protected by packages that are frequently made of corrugated board. Therefore, the strength of corrugated board containers is crucial for preserving the content, while an optimization of corrugated board containers is essential to save money and resources. Unfortunately, standard compression tests show a wide dispersion in container performance, and so, to avoid failure often containers have to be overdesigned. Dispersion in performance arises from different factors, among which the most important are variable quality of raw materials, imperfections produced by the manufacturing process in local and global geometry, and environmental conditions. Standard quality tests performed on the finished container are affected simultaneously by influencing parameters making identification of the cause of the lack of strength a difficult task. Structural analysis of paperboard components is a critical topic in the design of containers that have to withstand compression loads due to stacking. The evaluation of a container’s buckling behaviour requires a deep knowledge of paperboard stiffness properties. In the reviewed literature we found studies on the strength of paperboard, including the effect of local buckling exhibited by the liners. However, in this study elastic properties are evaluated using composite laminate plate theory. A numerical procedure was proposed to evaluate the global and local instability of paperboard sheets loaded in both the machine and the cross-direction, taking into account the actual microstructure, with a simplified tooth-shaped geometric model. PACKAGING TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE Packag. Technol. Sci. 2003; 16: 47–60 DOI:10.1002/pts.609