EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2010
CAE Technologies for Industry

Interaction of turbulent flows with packaging material for forming and design of food containers

Apparuti Daniele - Tetra Pak (Italy)

Abstract

Tetra Pak’s containers protect liquid food products in aseptic conditions by the use of packaging material. The latter is a multi layer structure mainly composed by paper which is laminated with polyethylene and aluminium in the Tetra Pak S.p.A.’s converting facilities.
The forming process of the typical Tetra Brik package shape is realized in a complex filling machine where the system interacts with the thin and flexible structure of the composite material.
The designing, development and simulation of the components dedicated to sealing, folding and filling of the pack has to consider the real physical properties of the fore mentioned matter in order to correctly forecast the necessary process parameters of the machine.
All the simulation activity therefore focuses on resolving the interaction of fluids like hot air, liquid sterilizing agent and liquid food product with the paper. The present work describes the coupling among computational tools in order to fully resolve the fluid structural interaction within the complex scenario of the packaging industry.