| Many of us purchase fruit, vegetables, and meat every week from our local shops and supermarkets, but how many of us think about the potentially hazardous journey experienced by these goods before they reach our homes?
Delicate and perishable foodstuffs require packaging which is attractive, strong, based on renewable materials, and able to withstand demanding transport conditions. Items are often stacked, un-stacked, loaded, and un-loaded many times. In addition, packages are subjected to cyclic loads whilst being carried by truck across rough terrain and on inferior road networks.
Billerud AB www.billerud.com is a leading Swedish based supplier of speciality products for consumer and industrial packaging. It has a turnover of approximately SEK 7 billion (757 Million Euro) and 2500 employees in eleven countries. One of its products, Billerud Flute®, is based on 100% primary fibre and is sold all over the world to containerboard producers, with a main focus on packaging for fruit and vegetables, meat and heavy duty items.
Magnus Björklund, the Development Engineer for packaging boards has studied the packaging supply chain from source to destination and knows that packing materials are also subjected to a very wide range of climatic conditions. Paper interacts with water and always seeks moist equilibrium which in turns affects its mechanical properties. Standard mechanical tests such as box compression test (BCT), and edge crush test (ECT) by themselves are not sufficient to quantify all of these effects on the material properties.
To run more advanced test programs, especially long term tests such as creep tests, Magnus installed a locally manufactured climate chamber. Because of the time required for each test, this is no ordinary climate chamber. It is large enough to accommodate not one - but five 20kN capacity Zwick proLine testing machines.
One test, for example, may maintain a constant load of 500kg on a package for a predetermined time period, whilst another carries out cyclic tests which simulate the forces during transportation. For these tests Magnus wanted high quality and reliable testing equipment. “Zwick machines are reliable in service and easy to handle in terms of the control software” he says. “Due to the limited space in the chamber we also needed to control the machines using laptop computers so we asked a local company to manufacture special mounting arms which allow us to mount the computers to the load frame of the testing machine.”
Magnus adds “The investment in such equipment gives Billerud a unique position in the paper, corrugated board, and fruit and vegetable industry world-wide. It enables us to identify the value of our and our customers’ products, reduce waste in the entire supply chain, and thereby increase profits for all the participants. This is a true win-win situation, and in addition, we are helping the environment as well as building on our existing knowhow advantage over our competitors.”
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