The NAFEMS Eastern European 2020 Virtual Conference took place on the 23rd and 24th of September 2020. The event gave participants access to high level presentations in the field of structural mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics and discrete element methods.

Resource Abstract

Corrugated cardboard is universally used as a sustainable packaging material. Sustainable packaging is a packaging that reduces its environmental footprint. Corrugated cardboard is used in making carton boxes which provide crush resistance, puncture strength and stacking strength to the product. It helps to protect the products from damages during long-distance transportation, shipping and handling. During transportation and storage, carton boxes are subjected to various environmental conditions. Environmental conditions more precisely the relative humidity (RH) along with temperature adversely affects the mechanical properties of cardboard like compressive/tensile strength, cushioning characteristic and increases the risk of product damages.



The aim of this study was to develop a characterised cardboard FE model considering three environments. This motivated to study the effect of environmental conditions on frequently used cardboard configurations. Literature review was performed to understand the cardboard structure, identify physical tests and different approaches used in cardboard FE modeling. Cardboard is an anisotropic sandwich structure where corrugated paper (flute) is sandwiched between top and bottom layers of paper. Tensile tests were performed on different grades of papers in machine direction (MD) and cross direction (CD) under three environmental conditions. Similarly, a flat crush test (FCT) was performed on different cardboard flutes. Physical test data was analyzed and material parameters were determined for the orthotropic material model. Flutes were modeled as a homogeneous structure to

simply numerical calculations. With this simplification cardboard modeled with 2D meshing composite. Three point bending tests and edge crush tests (ECT) were performed in cross direction (CD) of cardboard to evaluate correlation level of characterised material model. Material model showed good correlation with the physical test data.