Companies that produce or use packaging put their innovations to the test through horizontal acceleration tests carried out by ITENE in accordance with the EUMOS standard. Among them are the companies Safe Pallets, which has developed anti-slip interposers for pallets that improve the stability and protection of loads, and Dow Chemical which has identified the necessary technical specifications for both film used in the beverage sector and for covers intended for loading heavy goods. For its part, among the companies that use packaging in their operations is the food company GBfoods, which has used these tests to obtain an improved wrapping of its stretch film.
Industrial companies, both those manufacturers of packaging and those that use it in their operations, resort to horizontal acceleration tests, in which the conditions in which goods are transported are simulated, in order to identify improvements in their packaging system and palletized or to demonstrate, in the case of packaging manufacturing companies, that their new developments contribute to improving the stability and compactness of the load and therefore to compliance with Royal Decree 563/2017.
These tests have been carried out in the transport simulation center of the Technological Institute of Packaging, Transport and Logistics (ITENE) following the EUMOS 40509 standard, now in its new improved version corresponding to 2020. ITENE is the only entity in Spain that performs this type of rehearsal. The EUMOS 40509 standard is included in the provisions on cargo securing of the European Union Directive 2014/47 / EU on roadside technical inspections as a standard applicable to packaging for transport.
In the case of Safe Pallet, in the tests carried out by ITENE it has been verified that the non-slip interposers for pallets developed by this company have improved the stability and protection of the loads, even reducing the amount of stretch film by 20% and increasing the levels. palletizing.
For its part, Dow Chemical has compared, with the support of ITENE, the behavior of a new stretch film with a 14 micron rating compared to that currently used by the beverage industry (23 micron), in turn combining different micron ratings of the grouping shrink film cans (50 and 60 microns). The multinational company used the EUMOS 40509 horizontal acceleration test to determine the influence on the stability and safety of the loads of the optimizations made both in the shrink film for grouping the cans and in the stretch film of the load. Along with this, Dow Chemical also compared, in this same project, the influence on load stability of two possible technical specifications of an elastic sleeve intended for the heavy goods sector, in particular for bag loads. The results of the project were satisfactory, since they made it possible to identify the optimal technical specifications for each of the two case studies, the beverage sector and the heavy load sector.
The companies that use packaging also carry out this test to be able to characterize and measure the level of acceleration that their load is capable of supporting with a given packaging. Among them is the company GBfoods, which has resorted to these horizontal acceleration tests following the EUMOS 40509 standard in order to know the capacity of its packaging to withstand a certain level of acceleration and thus be able to obtain an improved wrapping of its stretch film .
