Protects what's good
Tetra Pak is the world’s leading liquid food processing and packaging solutions company.
Working closely with their customers and suppliers, they provide safe, innovative and environmentally sound products that each day meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people.
Broken locking pins caused recalls
For over 20 years Tetra Pak’s R&D department had been trying to overcome a problem caused by broken locking pins used in their packing machines.
Unable to solve the challenge, they had to ask customers to replace the pin after 1,000 hours of operation to avoid failure during operations. If the locking pins were not replaced after 1000 hours, they would suddenly break and end up in one of the sealed packages.
New locking pin design 100 times stronger
Different flow and modal analyses revealed a formerly unknown root cause of the problem. In turn, the max stress point on the locking pin was discovered, which lead to the design and development of a locking pin with a lifetime of over 100,000 hours of operation compared to the initial 1,000 hours.
No locking pin has ever broken since then.
External second opinions were essential
It was essential to give this challenge to external teams that had not spent 20 years on the task.
The lack of excessive experience helped them discover the root cause and a new solution that was too simple for the internal R&D team to consider.