Aug 5, 2015 | By Simon
Although it may not receive as much attention as the design and engineering industries, the package design industry is nonetheless just as important when it comes to actually delivering consumer goods from a manufacturer to the end user.
Because of the need to stand out in an ever-expanding marketplace, many package designers turn to the same techniques used by product designers and engineers in order to end up with a compelling design solution, and more often than not, this process can heavily lean on 3D printing to help iterate on multiple designs.
Among other package design companies who have recently turned to 3D printing to develop an innovative take on a package design include Italy’s Sipa. The company’s package design development team recently turned to 3D printing to aid in producing a complex, contoured PET plastic elephant bottle design - all in under two months’ time.
Located in northeast Italy, Sipa is no stranger to the package design and manufacturing industry; as a division of Zoppas Industries, the company has over 20 years’ of experience in plastic container design, manufacturing and filling - however it wasn’t until 2012 when the company began getting serious about using additive manufacturing technologies to produce plastic bottle designs.
Today, the company uses an entry-level 3D printer model (although they prefer to not name the company) and polylactic acid (PLA) polymer filament. The decision to use PLA is based on its ability to produce a neutral color for slightly transparent bottles. Although other filaments have been tested, PLA has consistently proved to be the most efficient because it is among the easiest-to-use polymers handled by the printer.
For the elephant bottle project - which was done as a part of the Brau Beviale 2014 exhibition held in November in Nürnberg, Germany - the team wanted to design a bottle that highlighted their premium design capabilities. After researching and developing a number of ideas, the elephant bottle was deemed the best design direction based on both a technical and a fashionable standpoint.
In an interview with Packaging Digest, the team explained that “the idea was to represent in a natural way the shape of this animal in its environment in Africa while keeping in mind the capability of SIPA blow-molding machines. It was suggested to consider an elephant on its hind legs that is reaching for the top leaves with its trunk.”
In an effort to demonstrate how quickly the team was able to pull off such a feat, they chose to design and fabricate the bottle over a two month period just before the competition.
Over the two months before the November competition, the package design team began the design process with several rounds of sketches. Although some of the initial designs were further developed using 3D modeling tools, the team admits that it was difficult to truly envision what the bottle would look like in the real world due to its complex geometry and transparent nature. At this stage, the team opted to use the 3D printer to produce prototypes of their three favorite designs.
“The three designs were printed at a smaller scale to have the results in a short time before producing the mold,” explain the team.
“It had to provide a compromise between time and technical results, i.e., seeing advantages and precision in the stability and shape of final bottles, the label zone and other details.”
From these three 3D printed prototypes, each of which took approximately six hours to print, the team further analyzed the processibility, performance and aesthetics of each of the bottle designs. The ‘Elephant 1’ bottle ended up coming ahead of the other two, however the team continued to develop the design including the addition of texture on some of the smoother parts of the bottle in order to communicate the roughness of the elephant hide.
After further analyzing the 3D prints and refining the design direction, the final mold for the bottle was developed and used in the blow-molding machine so that samples could be made. According to the design team, the finished bottle possesses all the aspects that were considered during the development process and seen in the 3D printed model. For the event, the team produced 200 of the bottles on the blow-molding machine, which were displayed at the Brau trade exhibition and at other industry events including the National Plastics Exposition (NPE) in Orlando, FL, in 2015.
As for utilizing the same process for future client projects, the team will take it on a case-by-case basis.
“Sipa has clients who ask for 3D prints of their bottles, which are useful for label design along with the all the other parameters considered in a project.”
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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