Abstract

De-risking line instability for a new bottle design relies heavily on physical line trials in the beverage industry. Multiple factors contribute to this line instability, including the bottle's geometry design, the bottle's material, surface characteristics of the bottle and conveyor belt, the dynamics and kinematics of the bottle. However, this is often an extensive trial and error process in practice as the detailed bottle motion capturing and analysis is lacking. This measure leads to business hurdles, particularly if the line is already in production. The time and resources spent testing the new bottle design translate into the loss in the existing production line. Numerical tools are used in this study to understand the possible bottle motions in the line convey process. This study explores and evaluates the capability of the virtual packaging line model to pre-screen for the most likely successful solutions for the final physical trials' validation. Models of a virtual packaging line were developed based on a section of the representative plant layout. Both the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Discrete Element Method (DEM) modeling tools are used to identify an approach that minimizes the computational cost while still capturing the essential physics. Several parameters, including the bottle geometry, coefficient of friction between bottle and conveyor belt, levelness of the belt, conveyor speed, were varied to test the bottle stability under different conditions to identify the potential line instability (bottle fall overs, denting, and stoppages) spots and causes. Detailed time-dependent bottle behaviors were captured and analyzed. The DEM model achieves an outstanding balance between reasonable computational resources and sufficient fidelity of the bottle characteristic and its motion on the line. Videos from different plant configurations are serving as model inputs to fine-tune and validate the model results. This model is found to have great potential to replicate the desired bottle physical behavior in various line conditions accurately.