Performance testing and comparison of closures for corrugated shipping containers

Corrugated boxes are the preferred shipping container of the 21st century. For the past hundred years it has successfully replaced wooden boxes and crates due to advantages like cost, ease of use, light-weight, and printability. At present hot-melt adhesive, pressure sensitive tape and staples are used as major box closures. There have been limited studies done to compare the performance and integrity of corrugated fiberboard boxes as a function of closure type.This study compared the performance of existing closure systems described above with a newly developed hot melt adhesive that is infra-red (IR) cured. This new adhesive developed by National Starch Company is a solvent free thermoplastic hot melt. Two different box sizes (small and large) with packaged weights of 20 and 40 lb were drop and compression tested to determine the closure integrity during handling respectively. Later was a newly developed test for empty and closed samples of corrugated boxes. The results showed that hot melt is better than both pre-applied adhesive and tape for both large and small case sizes. Boxes with full flaps were found to be significantly better than those with partial flaps. Adhesive failure percentage analysis shows that pre-applied was better than hot melt for large full-flap boxes. The hot melt adhesive showed the best performance for the larger sized and heavy boxes.