Instrumentation & Predictive Analysis In Support of

Environmental Sustainability
By Dale Knochenmuss and Clinton A. Haynes
about the authors
Clint Haynes is Vice President of SES, with two decades of experience using predictive engineering tools. His has special expertise in the areas structural dynamics, sound and vibration analysis. Dale Knochenmuss is a Senior Associate at the SES Cincinnati office. He has special experience in the areas of experimental design, instrumentation, data collection and analysis.

The worlds largest retailer is leading an initiative to promote sustainable practices in consumer goods packaging with a goal of reducing packaging in its supply chain 5% by 2013. Toward that end Wal-Mart has introduced a 9-point packaging scorecard that will be used to evaluate suppliers and reward sustainable packaging.
The implications are significant for manufacturers of consumer products. With thousands of distinct products and billions of units produced each year, even a small amount of packaging waste can have a huge impact. Our challenge is to reduce packaging waste while maintaining the structural performance and aesthetics that consumers expect. Consumer products are not often thought of as having structural requirements. In fact, they are highly engineered designs that experience a wide range of loads and environmental conditions. To successfully reach the shelves in a retail store, most products receive several layers of packaging. Individual units are boxed in cases that are then stacked several layers high on pallets for bulk shipment. The trip from manufacturer to store can involve transportation by sea, rail, and truck and may include extended periods of storage in cold rail cars, hot trucks, or stacked to the roof in a warehouse or distribution center. Despite the harsh conditions and rough handling that can occur along the way, the vast majority of all products reach their destination intact, undamaged, and ready for sale. Meeting environmental sustainability goals and improving Wal-Mart scorecard metrics will require changes to almost every element of current packaging systems. The clear challenge in this effort will be to reduce material usage and waste while maintaining acceptable package performance levels and achieving parity or reductions in cost. Improving environmental performance while increasing prices to pay for it will clearly not be acceptable as Wal-Mart expects this program to result in significant cost savings. Blindly reducing the amount of packaging material increases the risk of incurring product damage in the distribution system. A more structured approach involves first understanding the current packaging system with respect to cost, performance and environmental impact, along with the distribution system in which it must function. Only then can informed decisions be made regarding where and how to make changes, while giving appropriate consideration to issues such as static and dynamic structural stability, material creep and damage accumulation. Collecting information about mechanical and environmental conditions in the distribution system has been problematic for many manufacturers. Typically, there is no specific data available that describes the loads, vibrations, temperatures and other parameters experienced by products during transportation and warehousing. SES has addressed this problem by developing an instrumented shipping pallet (Fig. 1) called PalletDAQ, for pallet data acquisition.
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Figure 1: Instrumented pallet loaded with water.

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PalletDAQ is based on a standard 48" x 40" pallet footprint and deckboard pattern. The wooden support blocks that usually separate the pallets base and deck have been replaced by metal enclosures containing a computerized data acquisition system and batteries (Fig. 2). Multiple channels of mixed sensor types can be monitored and recorded for extended time periods. Typical measurements can include combinations of load, pressure, acceleration, temperature, humidity, displacement and other sensor types.
Figure 2: PalletDAQ with computer compartment open.

Figure 3 shows the first three days of data from a week-long transit test where load cells were incorporated into a beverage pallet. The periods when the shipment was moving are readily apparent as bursts of activity in the data. By including a triaxial accelerometer in the sensor package, vibration power spectral density data for the entire trip can be extracted, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 3: Transit load data

Figure 4: Acceleration power spectral density

High-speed data bursts can be collected to capture significant events and correlate signals between channels. Figure 5 shows a high-acceleration event with the corresponding load data in Figure 6.

Figure 5: Data burst collected during high acceleration event

Figure 6: Load cell data corresponding to Fig. 5 acceleration event

When it comes to developing innovative analytical and experimental engineering tools to help consumer product companies optimize their packaging designs, SES has been an industry leader for many years. This expertise is a valuable asset for companies addressing environmental sustainability issues in their primary

and secondary packaging and distribution channels. The addition of PalletDAQ provides an expanded suite of experimental tools to use in ongoing packaging cost reduction and environmental sustainability efforts across a broad range of industries.

For more about package design for environmental Sustainability, contact SES at 866-888-8333
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