A method is presented to apply solid powder/granulate contamination (ground coffee and blood powder) in between the heat conductive seals of flexible packaging materials. A response surface method is tested and validated to optimize seal strength of heat conductive sealing with and without solid contamination. In this study, a maximal seal strength is defined as optimal. Using these methods, three typical packaging films with varying seal layer composition (metallocene linear low‐density polyethylene (LLDPE), plastomer, and sodium ionomer) are maximized towards contaminated seal strength. Contamination caused a decrease in seal strength and narrowed down the process window (seal temperature and time combinations) in which at least 90% of the maximal strength is obtained. The influence of seal layer composition on the clean and solid (ground coffee and blood powder) contaminated seal performance (seal strength, process window, and leak tightness) was evaluated. The film with the plastomer‐based seal layer outperformed the other films with respect to the width of the process window. It also reached a higher seal strength and a higher amount of leak tight seals (evaluated with the dye penetration test) after optimization. The hot tack test was evaluated as predictive test for the contaminated seal strength. The results of this study do not support an indicative relationship.

Packaging protects food products from environmental influences, assuring quality and safety throughout shelf life if properly performed. Packaging quality depends on the quality of the packaging material and of the closure or seal. A common problem possibly jeopardizing seal quality is the presence of seal contamination, which can cause a decreased seal strength, an increased packaging failure risk and leak formation. Therefore, early detection and removal of seal contaminated packages from the production chain is crucial. In this work, a pulsed-type active thermography method using the heated seal bars as an excitation source was studied for detecting seal contamination. Thermal image sequences of contaminated seals were recorded shortly after sealing. The detection performances of six thermal image processing methods, based on a single frame, a fit of the cooling profiles, thermal signal reconstruction, pulsed phase thermography, principal component thermography and a matched filter, were compared. High resolution digital images served as a reference to quantify seal contamination, and processed thermal images were mapped to these references. The lowest detection limit (equivalent diameter 0.60 mm) was obtained for the method based on a fit of the cooling profiles. Moreover, the detection performance of this method did not depend strongly on the time after sealing at which recording of the thermal images was started, making it a robust and generally applicable method.

Proper closure is an essential packaging quality aspect and can, amongst others, be achieved with ultrasonic sealing. The ultrasonic sealing performance depends on the film type, and the seal settings, such as seal time, applied force and ultrasonic amplitude. Because these parameters are less intuitive than heat seal parameters and optimal settings are undefined for many films, this work presents an efficient approach to evaluate the effect of these settings on the ultrasonic sealing performance. An experimental design defines the experiments to perform. A response surface methodology is then used to model the relation between seal settings and sealing performance. Based on these models, the seal settings are optimized. As there are several criteria to express sealing performance, single-criteria and multicriteria optimizations are described.The approach was illustrated for a polyethylene terephthalate/linear low-density polyethylene-C4 film. The seal settings were optimized to obtain high seal strength, limited ultrasonic horn displacement, and low seal energy. The optimum settings were 0.1 seconds (seal time), 4.32 N/mm (force), and 28.75 μm (amplitude). The predicted optimum strength, horn displacement, and energy were 2.32 N/mm, 40 μm, and 11.66 J, respectively. Besides the optimum, the seal window is also of interest. A broad seal window ensures sufficient seal strength for a wide range of settings. For the polyethylene terephthalate/linear low-density polyethylene-C4 film, a strength of ≥90% of the optimum was obtained for 39% of the input combinations within the design space.The presented approach is widely applicable (other films and sealing processes) since it is flexible in the input parameters, design, and responses. KEYWORDSdesign of experiments, multicriteria seal optimization, polyolefin packaging, response surface methodology, ultrasonic sealing

In the food industry packaging is often applied to protect the product from the environment, assuring quality and safety throughout shelf life if properly performed. Packaging quality depends on the material used and the closure (seal). The material is selected based on the specific needs of the food product to be wrapped. However, proper closure of the package is often harder to achieve. One problem possibly jeopardizing seal quality is the presence of food particles between the seal. Seal contamination can cause a decreased seal strength and thus an increased packaging failure risk. It can also trigger the formation of microchannels through which air and microorganisms can enter and spoil the enclosed food. Therefore, early detection and removal of seal-contaminated packages from the production chain is essential. In this work, a pulsed-type active thermography method using the heat of the sealing bars as an excitation source was studied for detecting seal contamination. The cooling profile of contaminated seals was recorded. The detection performance of four processing methods (based on a single frame, a fit of the cooling profile, pulsed phase thermography and a matched filter) was compared. High resolution digital images served as a reference to quantify contamination. The lowest detection limit (equivalent diameter of 0.63 mm) and the lowest processing time (0.42 s per sample) were obtained for the method based on a single frame. Presumably, practical limitations in the recording stage prevented the added value of active thermography to be fully reflected in this application.

A novel meta-heuristic approach for minimizing nonlinear constrained problems is proposed, which offers tolerance information during the search for the global optimum. The method is based on the concept of design and analysis of computer experiments combined with a novel two phase design augmentation (DACEDA), which models the entire merit space using a Gaussian process, with iteratively increased resolution around the optimum. The algorithm is introduced through a series of cases studies with increasing complexity for optimizing uniformity of a short-wave infrared (SWIR) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) illumination system (IS). The method is first demonstrated for a two-dimensional problem consisting of the positioning of analytical isotropic point sources. The method is further applied to two-dimensional (2D) and five-dimensional (5D) SWIR HSI IS versions using close-and far-field measured source models applied within the non-sequential ray-tracing software FRED, including inherent stochastic noise. The proposed method is compared to other heuristic approaches such as simplex and simulated annealing (SA). It is shown that DACEDA converges towards a minimum with 1 % improvement compared to simplex and SA, and more importantly requiring only half the number of simulations. Finally, a concurrent tolerance analysis is done within DACEDA for to the five-dimensional case such that further simulations are not required.