Tetra Pak – Making food safe and available, everywhere and protect what’s good: food, people and the planet
Tetra Pak uses Simcenter to undergo digital transformation, leading the way in food packaging, availability and safety.
Leading with safe and sustainable packaging
The global food chain is at the center and changing consumer preferences, including more health-conscious customers, regional instability and climate change, making primary crop resources uncertain. Trends like sustainable sourcing, processing and packaging; buy-local, organic and seasonal consumption and vegan and novel foods are driving factors behind consumer choices. Food waste is another challenge, with the United Nations (UN) estimating that 17 percent of total global food production becomes waste. A more circular and sustainable approach could help feed the entire planet by 2050.
Tetra Pak, a world leading food processing and packaging solutions company with over 70 years of experience , continues to innovate its revolutionary paper-based cartons for food and beverages, originally developed in the 1950s. This popular packaging option assures food safety via aseptic packaging, meaning it can sterilize food in one stream and the packaging material in another. Final processing brings the food product and packaging material together in a sterile environment, the filling machine and results in an easy-to-use and recyclable packaging option.
With aseptic processing and packaging, everything in the production chain is commercially sterile, including food, packaging materials and equipment, as well as the food packaging environment itself. This helps keep perishable liquid foods safe and flavorful for up to a year, without the need for refrigeration or preservatives, while retaining color, texture, taste and nutritional value.
There are numerous advantages including longer and safer shelf-life periods and therefore less food waste as well as improved production plans and optimized raw material usage. Aseptic packaging is extremely cost-efficient distribution-wise. Manufacturers can reach consumers in remote locations and provide safe and nutritious food. On the recycling side, aseptic beverage cartons can be recycled wherever the collection, sorting and recycling infrastructures are in place, making it a popular choice for milk and juice packaging, especially in Europe.
“Consumers are looking for less plastic packaging and ingredients and products that come from sustainable sources,” says Ulf Lindblad, Technology Specialist in D&T Packaging Equipment & Automation department at Tetra Pak. “They are also putting their buying power behind products and brands that ensure resources across food production are reduced, recovered and optimized by means of innovative, advanced technologies and efficient processes. These are clear market shifts and challenges that we are taking very seriously.”
Producing over 179 billion packages annually
In 2023, Tetra Pak produced more than 179 billion packages. This roughly translates to about 22 Tetra Pak containers for every person on the planet annually. To accomplish this, there is a massive amount of filling machines (8,426), processing units (108,396) and downstream equipment (21,789) in operation world-wide. This puts enormous pressure on the company’s development and technology (D&T) teams, production managers and specialized engineers who keep it all working quickly, safely and sustainably.
To ease the burdens that come with this scale of production, Tetra Pak enlisted Siemens Digital Industries Software and leveraged Simcenter™ software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.
Keeping up with 10 packages per second
The fastest Tetra Pak packaging machine, the Tetra Pak E3/Speed Hyper, – can produce 10 packages per second. Accurate and safe packaging at these hyper-fast processing speeds is an engineering challenge because of the speed, volume, strict food safety regulations, stringent waste reduction requirements and the company’s dedication to use innovation to drive carbon emission down at every step.
“Thanks to our multiphysics Simcenter tools, we can get earlier insights into our R&D and production processes, leading to high performance products and manufacturing processes.”
Ulf Lindblad, Technology Specialist in D&T Packaging Equipment & Automation Department, Tetra Pak
“Processing and packaging liquid food products covers several engineering disciplines, including tough-to-model fluids and thermal and electromechanical elements,” says Lindblad. “And the simulation models we develop at Tetra Pak often combine multiple physics models simultaneously on multiple scales in time and space.”
“By combining our advanced Simcenter simulation tools with the expertise from our engineers who know how to push the tools to their limits, we can turn this complexity into a competitive advantage. We are laser-focused on eliminating waste on all fronts by enhancing production efficiency, reducing energy and water consumption and strengthening product and material optimisation.”
“More importantly, we gain a fundamental understanding of the entire end-to-end process chain, and this allows us to continuously improve the environmental profile of food processing and packaging solutions.”
Simulating the food value chain
Due to those benefits, Tetra Pak is expanding its simulation process throughout the food value chain, which includes processing, packaging, filling, handling, usage and recycling – from sourcing and production locations to final waste elimination and disposal. The company also works on innovative applications like emission red
“We take a very holistic view when it comes to the simulation solutions we use,” says Lindblad. “It is only thanks to our advanced simulation models and multiphysics insights that we understand what is happening to our equipment during production. We can predict and fix downtime and quality issues before they happen.”
“We commit to making food safe and available, everywhere and we promise to protect what’s good: food, people and the planet. Thanks to multiphysics Simcenter tools, we can get earlier insights into our R&D and production processes, leading to high performance products and manufacturing processes.”
Diving into the Simcenter solutions
By working with Siemens experts, Tetra Pak developed a sophisticated digital twin of their processing and packaging systems. They use these models to optimize, validate and control processes ranging from processing raw milk to improving the performance of packaging materials, filling machines and packages.
“We are known for all sorts of package shapes that we create using a creasing pattern that is printed or pressed onto the package material,” explains Lindblad. “As you can imagine, our process is very fast, and the machines are huge. We have to make sure that each package is formed and filled correctly. It is pure fluid-structure interaction and simulating that is a challenge.”
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is how the behavior of a fluid affects the structure holding the fluid. For example, when holding a milk carton, the tighter the squeeze, the more milk spills out. Unless this interaction can be understood and investigated, one cannot design a carton that is convenient for customers to use because it spills and does not have a good grip.
Additionally, simulating the FSI on billions of products is complex due to the large variety of packages, filling machines, food processing units and downstream equipment.
For this, Tetra Pak created advanced, multiphysics FSI simulation models with Simcenter Amesim™ software and Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ software, which they can use to answer key engineering questions and enhance existing processes via a digital twin rather than a physical prototype.
Using simulation to improve the environmental profile of processes and packaging
At Tetra Pak, simulation starts early in the process: converting raw materials, like paper, aluminum foil and polyethylene pellets, into packaging material. During this, teams use a two-way FSI simulation in Simcenter to study the process, which involves melting different grades of plastic, and then these layers are coated to aluminium and paper board.
“It is such a quick process that it is impossible to take any sort of measurements, so using Simcenter simulations is where we get engineering insight,” says Lindblad. “With the simulation, we can visualize aspects that are otherwise difficult to observe, like examining pressure levels on a packaging process where there are multiple rolls distributed to the filling machines.”
“Using Simcenter, you can study pressure at the nip, see if there are ripples on the melt curtains and the effect of the air patterns generated by the fast-moving rollers, about 650 meters per minute. This allows us to prevent a lot of issues by using the FSI simulation to see what is happening with this fast-paced machine.”
Additionally, with FSI simulation, Tetra Pak improved confetti handling from their process, which is produced while cutting holes in the paper for application of opening devices on the package in the filling machine.
“Simulating simultaneous forming and filling has been the holy grail for me and my team; we’ve been struggling with this for years. However, thanks to our collaboration and support from Siemens experts, we can succeed with this very complex simulation as well.”
Ulf Lindblad, Technology Specialist in D&T Packaging Equipment & Automation Department, Tetra Pak
“When we cut these holes, we must get rid of the confetti via a rotating evacuation device,” says Lindblad. “In some cases, the confetti get stuck and the production stops. This is very expensive, and we want to avoid it at all costs. Thanks to our FSI simulation, we could see what happened in six degrees of freedom and when it happened. We discovered that the confetti deform and can clog the production. We learned a lot about preventing this pricey issue before it happens.”
Overcoming multiphysics challenges
Further down the process, using Simcenter simulation proves even more valuable with multiphysics, multiscale turbulence models that help engineers understand production variations and guarantee the safety and quality of the food product. For example, the process for making evaporated milk powder using a spray dryer involves atomizing liquid milk with 200 to 250° Celsius (C) of hot air.
“Before Simcenter, I don’t think I have ever seen so much information pulled out of one single simulation,” says Lindblad. “You can look at velocities, temperatures, particles, path lines, particle residence time and moisture levels. But more interesting are the concentration and the temperature history. This lets us study protein kinetics, an important nutrient in milk and whey. We have proteins that are temperature-sensitive, which will denature and aggregate at the wrong temperature. With the information from Simcenter, we can keep a close eye on the temperatures and prevent protein breakdown to deliver food quality.”
Dealing with complexity
A new area that Tetra Pak uses simulation for is mixing, namely reversing milk evaporation by mixing powder and liquid, which adds further variables to an already highly complex process.
“We know our configurations work well, but when a new product is introduced, knowing exactly what the mixing time should be could prove difficult. By becoming better at predicting mixing times, we can save energy and operating costs and significantly reduce our environmental impact. This is an ongoing investigation that we are working on with our Simcenter tools.”
Over the years, the team at Tetra Pak used the two-way FSI tool to gain insight into ways to solve additional packaging and processing challenges, from minimizing the gulping phenomenon when it comes to package performance to solving common package-filling processes like splashing, foaming and dripping with classic applications as well as for more viscous products like yogurt.
The team also uses simulation to gain regulatory approval for new machines and mission-critical food safety processes from governmental bodies like the FDA and complete studies for packaging solutions with an enhanced environmental profile, like swapping aluminum foil layer in aseptic cartons with a paper-based barrier and addressing tough engineering challenges like a complex process such as simultaneous forming and filling.
“Simulating simultaneous forming and filling has been the holy grail for me and my team; we’ve been struggling with this for years,” says Lindblad. “However, thanks to our partnership and support from Siemens experts, we can succeed with this very complex simulation as well.”
Want to dive deeper into consumer packaged goods machinery modeling and simulation? Check out this detailed webinar on the topic to learn more.
