Preform Extended Finish for Lightweight Bottle Resin Reduction
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Solution Overview
Problem
The challenge lies in creating lightweight plastic bottles that minimize resin usage while maintaining mechanical performance and structural integrity, as conventional designs often struggle with heat transfer and dimensional stability during the blow-molding process, leading to inefficiencies and increased material usage.
Innovation Solution
The introduction of a preform design with a neck portion and body portion featuring varying wall thicknesses, internal and external columns, and a tapered finish, which reduces material usage while ensuring structural integrity and ease of processing, allowing for efficient blow-molding and reduced heat transfer to the finish area.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of substance
If conventional preform design with uniform wall thickness is used, then structural integrity is maintained, but resin usage increases and weight increases
Solution Approach 1:
The preform features non-uniform wall thickness distribution with varying thickness in different regions (neck portion, body portion, base portion) optimized for local structural requirements. This allows reduced resin usage in non-critical areas while maintaining structural integrity in load-bearing regions, directly resolving the contradiction between material reduction and strength maintenance.
2Weight of moving object
If preform wall thickness is reduced to decrease weight, then resin usage decreases, but heat transfer control during blow-molding becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
Different wall thickness regions are strategically designed to control heat transfer characteristics during blow-molding. Thicker sections in specific areas act as thermal buffers while thinner sections reduce overall weight, allowing heat transfer to be managed locally without compromising the lightweighting objective.
Solution Approach 2:
The preform utilizes controlled variations in wall thickness parameters across different zones to modulate thermal properties. By adjusting thickness parameters locally, the design achieves optimal heat transfer control during processing while maintaining reduced overall weight.
3Weight of moving object
If preform wall thickness is reduced to achieve lightweighting, then resin usage decreases, but dimensional stability during processing deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The preform design incorporates strategically positioned thicker sections in critical areas (such as the neck and base regions) to maintain dimensional stability during blow-molding processing, while other non-critical areas utilize thinner walls to reduce overall weight. This localized thickness variation resolves the contradiction between lightweighting and dimensional control.
Data Source
AI summary
Disclosed are preforms which incorporate improvements in the region of the neck and upper segment of the body to allow the production of lightweight containers, such as bottles suitable for containing water or other beverages. In accordance with certain embodiments, the improvements include a thinner neck finish area than conventional bottles, where the thinner area is extended into the upper segment of the body portion below the support ring. Reducing the thickness in these areas of the bottle allows for less resin to be used in forming the preform and bottle.