Analysis of catastrophic failure of poly (ethylene terephthalate) pressurized bottle

Abstract

PET bottles use is widespread as it used to package a vast variety of materials, from beverage, food to house products we buy daily. PET, acronym for poly (ethylene terephthalate), is one of the most used thermoplastic polymer and offers a range of benefits as a material for bottle manufacture; it is light, clear, safe, and in particular offers high mechanical strength.
This is of particular interest to us since objective of this thesis is to propose a design for a small bottle that is capable of coping with internal pressure cycling. Manufacturing industry is not only looking at plastic bottles for solely purpose of storage but there is always interest for novel applications as part of equipment like a sprayer or even use to mix, dispense.
In this work we explore polymer properties, investigate analytical materials available to characterise proposed design and manufacture robustness, and derive recommendations from pressure vessel design to assist a bottle proposal and finally simulate in with ANSYS finite element software the critical geometry regions of the bottle base under proposed pressure cycling to validate overall performance.

Date of Award	19 Jun 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Martin Ansell (Supervisor) & Michele Meo (Supervisor)