Design and Optimization of Pouch Making and Sealing Assembly

Abstract

Pouching machines have wide scope in packaging products from forming of pouch from the roll of web, Filling and sealing. Every food product Form is looking forward to package their product in pouches automatically due to the ease. One of the crit- ical process related to product packaging is heat sealing. It is essential in package design to understand the controlling effect of process parameters like temperature, time and pressure on seal quality for verification of seal effectiveness and consistency. The Final quality of the sealed product is dictated by material combinations used in specific packaging applications and their interactions with the thermal and physical conditions of the process. To optimize these conditions for selected materials in the process, comprehensive knowledge of the process itself is needed in combination with supporting computational and experimental tools. Using fundamentals of heat transfer, models were developed and then analyzed to predict temperature distribu- tions to the seal bars and within material layers and to evaluate seal. A material layering order of biaxial oriented polypropylene film (bopp), adhesive, and again bopp film was used to generate model computationally and visually represent the heat transfer for both a two and three dimensional model of the heat sealing process. These computational models are validated by experimental methodology. For this a seal quality index is developed for producing a scale according to the strength of the seal quality on the basis of three process parameters. Finally, a model to assess and index the overall seal quality in actual industrial settings is provided.