(From left) Team members Roopesh Syamaladevi and Sumeet Dhawan together with team’s adviser Dr. Shyam Sablani (far right) receive the award from Jeff Siegel, President of Mica Corporation and past Chairman of the TAPPI Board of Directors.
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A Washington State University team composed of doctoral students from the biological systems engineering department won first place in the student packaging design competition during the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI), Polymers Laminations Adhesives Composites Extrusions (PLACE) conference held in Seattle.
TAPPI is the world’s largest and most prestigious association of engineers, scientists, and managers in the paper and packaging industries, while PLACE is a division within TAPPI that deals specifically with polymers and flexible plastic packaging.
The team’s design entry is called “boteFlex.” The novel packaging design is an expandable or collapsible bottle designed to contain value-added food powders. The overall design components include an expandable bottle, a flexible straw and a secondary packaging i.e. paperboard/polymer-based box. The design can be used for packaging a variety of powdered drinks such as infant formula, fortified juices, sports drink formula, probiotic milk powder, as well as for non-food powders.
In its un-stretched form, the boteFlex is sufficient to contain and maintain the integrity of the powder without the need of refrigeration. Also, the relatively small volume and weight of the package can significantly reduce the cost during handling, transport, and storage. In addition, the design is more environment friendly compared to the existing full volume packages available in the market. The expanded boteFlex provides the necessary volume for both the powder and the required water to make the value-added drink.
The development and fabrication of the boteFlex design was led by Ofero Caparino along with team members Sumeet Dhawan, Fermin Resurreccion, Roopesh Syamaladevi, and Wenjia Zhang under the supervision of the team’s adviser Dr. Shyam S. Sablani, assistant professor of biological systems engineering.
The design was initiated as a project under the Food Packaging course (BSysE 585) offered in Fall 2010. The packaging design is being marketed to potential industry partners involved in processing of high-value products, through the WSU Research Foundation (http://www.wsurf.org/).