A deeper understanding of the interaction between machine, packaging material and liquid product during the forming process of pouches is enabled by the use of numerical simulation.
Tetra Pak pouch forming system forms the pouches in a continuous fashion starting from a tube of packaging material filled with the liquid to be packaged.
A bunch of jaws, moved with special laws, shape the tube of packaging material into pouches. The liquid into the tube is supplied through an inlet pipe, placed inside the tube. Additionally a pouch forming systems has a counter-pressure flange and a floater that moves along the inlet pipe and floats on top of the liquid column. The floater is used to control the flow rate at the inlet pipe. Thus a complex problem with flexible walls, free surface flows and kinematic motion of different bodies under hydrodynamic and gravity forces needs to be simulated.
Simulating the pouch forming, including a detailed fluid-structure interaction is the goal of this paper. The simulation is performed coupling Abaqus for the structural side and FlowVision for the fluid side through a Direct Coupling interface. The definition of the problem as well the results of the simulation are presented in the paper.
A. Mameli, A. Magnusson, Tetra Pak Packaging Solutions
A. Aksenov, K. Kuznetsov, T. Luniewski, I. Moskalev, Capvidia
2013 SIMULIA Customer Conference, Page 1/15