Automated design process of sustainable industrial packaging

Sustainability and environmentology are becoming important issues because the natural resources have been heavily consumed in the past century and major parts of them have been wasted on some one-time-use type of applications such as packaging. As an engineer, and more basically as a resident of our only earth, one is obligated to preserve the natural resources for the coming generations. One should not selfishly consume the limited natural resources found on the earth but should use these with appreciation of what we have been given. Designs for sustainability and environmentology in industrial packaging are studied in this research by means of reducing unnecessary usage of material, increase structure strength under limited amount of material and replacing plastics with environmentally friendly materials. These ideas are accomplished by incorporating some design concepts on generating new packaging structures. These designs include design of the core structures of sandwich board, design of supporting tray efficiently, and design of molded pulp with better reinforcements. Topology optimization of packaging structures utilizing environmental friendly materials is also studied in this dissertation to determine a set of packaging with less material while strength of the packaging structure is optimized; and less pollution and impact on the environment is accomplished. The main contributions of this dissertation are: (1) Design toward sustainability and environmentology, (2) Developed a simple topology optimization scheme that provides valid results to design spaces with non-uniform element volume, (3) Development of automatic and efficient mold design algorithm for general supporting packaging, (4) Application of topology optimization to the design of industrial packaging, and (5) Development of systematic design process of designing molded pulp.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97)