If you’ve had a sports drink or opened a pill bottle, chances are, you’ve held a plastic container designed and produced by Amcor Rigid Packaging. Chances are, too, that the plastic bottles — which Amcor produces for food, beverage, healthcare, and home and personal care products — has been designed with sustainability in mind.
Amcor, a global provider of packaging solutions for consumer and healthcare products, is focused on making packaging that is lighter weight, recyclable, and reusable. It is also committed to increasing the amount of post-consumer recycled (PCR) material in its products to meet consumer demands.
Brands face increasing pressure to adopt packaging that not only protects and promotes products but also aligns with sustainability goals. Given shifts in consumer buying habits and minimum recycled content legislation enacted in several states – and more on the horizon – customers continue to request responsible packaging.
“Customers across all segments are looking to increase post-consumer recycled content,” said Brad Philip, principal design engineer at Amcor Rigid Packaging. “There is also a strong focus in the home care and beverage industries on reducing the weight of existing packaging. Our team has spent the past decade using advanced technology to engineer new containers. These optimized designs perform better than previous versions while using less material.”
Many times, a customer will come to Amcor with an idea to reduce materials or increase PCR in existing packaging, and it is up to Amcor’s industrial designers and engineers to turn that concept into a product.
The material redesign requires a lot of physical changes as it is up against a huge number of environmental variations, from temperature to altitude. Rather than engineering and immediately building a physical prototype, which can be time consuming and costly, Amcor uses Dassault Systèmes software to simulate the dynamic aspects of the package and anticipate how different shapes will react in the lifespan of that container.
“We design and redesign that container several times before we make that initial prototype,” Philip said.
Amcor has been using Dassault Systèmes Catia computer-aided design (CAD) software for a long time. And, historically, it required exporting out a file to bring it into the computer-aided engineering (CAE) software to run testing on it. It’s a good process that allows the design engineers to iterate, but when there is a dozen or more designs to test, and additional software involved, it can complicate the process.
Recently, Amcor upgraded to Dassault’s 3DExperience platform that connects processes and acts as a single version of the truth.
“We’re currently operating on the 3DExperience platform, which integrates CAD and finite element analysis (FEA) simulation environments into a unified workflow,” said Philip. “With the addition of automated design iteration tools, we can now programmatically modify CAD geometry, run finite element analysis, and evaluate performance metrics in a closed-loop system. The solver interprets simulation outputs and iteratively converges on an optimal design configuration.”
Philip said that in the past they have manually evaluated four to 12 design variants per project. “With this generative approach, we’re now exploring design spaces at a vastly higher resolution. Our most recent project processed over 80 million design permutations. It’s a paradigm shift from selecting the best option among a handful of manually created models to algorithmically identifying the most efficient solution from a virtually infinite design landscape.”
In the case of a product with millions of variations, the Dassault software can run 24/7, non-stop in the cloud over the course of several days, exploring the design space to accurately know whether a design provides the performance required.
The perfect package
According to Raymond Wodar, Dassault Systèmes’ global director of business consulting for the CPG and retail industries, the evolution from deploying separate design modules that weren’t integrated to a platform that brings together all the CAE applications, structural 3D design, and simulation workflows is a way to automate the process.
“And, like Brad said, you can leverage the computing power in the cloud to do these really robust optimization routines and generate more predictive outcomes that are going to be closer to the real physical world,” explained Wodar.
But you still need to develop the methods and models, which comes from feeding historical testing data, in order to model the real world with better accuracy.
At Amcor, they’ve been conducting these kinds of tests for over 15 years, so it has been an intuitive exercise to run the software. “But we are finding ways of exploring what it’s capabilities are,” Philip said, noting they’ve been running these powerful tools on actual projects — and even existing products — to see if they’ve missed anything related to the optimization of the geometry on the actual container. This is a way to make sure that the newer, lightweight container can survive the palletization, the shipping, and the different physical challenges that the container will experience.
“So that’s really the advantage,” Philip said. “We can make a lightweight container that performs as well as the previous generation…It’s a new generation of design that is coming online, and we are at the forefront of that.”
To learn more about Amcor’s solutions, click here.
