Investigating Creep in Corrugated Packaging

In this study, the inverse relationship between lifetime and secondary creep rate was verified suggesting that shorter duration tests can be used to evaluate lifetimes. Also, the variability in creep rate was significantly lower than previous studies suggesting that using enhanced testing facilities could reduce required number of repetitions. A novel finding was an observed transition point in applied loading level where cyclic humidity conditions had the highest creep rates at low loads and constant high humidity conditions had the highest creep rate at high loads. Finally, it was determined that a standard moisture cycling history for a standard test protocol will be difficult to determine and the moisture sorption behaviour of each box type must be accounted for. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.