A Computer Simulation and Experimental Study of Weight Reduced Carbonated Soft Drink PET Bottle Manufacturing

Abstract

There is an urgent demand to reduce the plastic mass as it has become a serious environmental concern. Plastic bottles made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) have been widely used for water, milk, and other beverages packaging. PET blow molding process has sought researchers’ attention for the fabrication of light weight PET bottles with reduced cost. In this study, lightweight PET bottles were fabricated by reducing the weight of PET, usually used for manufacturing PET bottle in industry. Here, initially computer simulation was performed for designing the preform with reduced weight and the stretch blow molding process was used to fabricate carbonated soft drink PET bottles. The computer simulation was performed under the same conditions as the experiment using non-isothermal models to analyze the blowing phenomena, velocity, temperature, thickness distributions, and stretch ratio through stretching path of PET bottles. Experimental and simulation results were compared with existing PET bottle to confirm that the stretch blow molding simulation was significant for designing and fabricating of weight reduced PET bottle through the stretch blow molding process.