Bottles and jars – Sidewall structure – Pressure-responsive structure
Patent
1995-08-14
1998-01-06
Garbe, Stephen P.
Bottles and jars
Sidewall structure
Pressure-responsive structure
215382, 220673, D9556, B65D 140
Patent
active
057045046
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention refers, in general terms, to a bottle for hot filling, and more particularly to a one-way plastic bottle, which is going to be filled with a hot liquid.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Liquid foodstuffs, such as natural fruit juices, milk, vegetal oils and the like, medicinal solutions and suspensions, as well as other liquid products for human ingestion, in order to be adequately conditioned should be sterilized before or during bottling, usually being subjected to thermal treatments, such as pausterization.
In these processes, the liquid is either hot sterilized and bottled in equally sterilized containers, or bottled and sterilized together with the open container. The capping is subsequently effected onto the still hot assembly.
Until the liquid cools down to the room temperature, it suffers a reduction in its volume. Since the container is hermetically sealed, the vacuum generated by the contraction of the liquid mass tends to draw the wall of said container, causing the collapse thereof.
To the bottler, it is fundamental to keep the good image of his product, i.e., to present both the container and label in perfect conditions, till said product is purchased by the costumer. It is therefore inadmissible to have a distorted bottle with a label that has wrinkled and torn due to the deformation of the wall.
Traditionally, the bottles used in the conditioning of liquids for human ingestion are made of glass, which is the material presenting the higher number of mechanical and visual characteristics, such as transparency, required for that purpose. Nevertheless, because the glass is breakable and heavy, it has become of high cost, due to the high number of bottle breaks during handling. Moreover, the transportation of glass greatly increases the cost of the product.
With the evolution of the petrochemical industry and the consequent rise of new thermoplastic materials, much effort has been made in trying to obtain a material, which would be adequate to the manufacture of bottles to be hot filled and which would impart to said bottles the typical glass characteristics of transparency, indeformability and perfect label fixation, associated with low weight and high impact resistance.
The tests with first generation thermoplastics, such as polyethylenes, polypropylenes and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), produced bottles with little resistance to collapse, insufficiently transparent, or presenting both said inconveniences.
The second generation thermoplastics, such as nylon, produced vessels with good mechanical resistance, but with a milky aspect, almost opaque and expensive.
The technique of the third generation thermoplastics, known as the generation of the engineering plastics, i.e., the plastics adequate to be used in engineering pieces, such as gears, structural elements, etc., has produced a material of high transparency and excelent mechanical characteristics, which was potentially useful to the manufacture of one-way containers for liquids: the polyethylene terephthalate, usually known by the sigla PET. Due to the above cited qualities, the PET has been widely and increasingly used in the manufacture of bottles to be filled with cold liquid. Nevertheless, when filled with hot liquids, the PET bottles have presented problems related to the collapse of their walls after cooling.
The above cited problem has been faced by the industry in several manners. Firstly, as a more immediate solution, attempts were made to increase the weight of the container. The tests, in which the wall thickness was increased, have proved to be effective for solving the problem of mechanical deformation cited above, i.e., the collapse of the bottle due to the contraction of the liquid when cooling. Nevertheless, there has been observed a second factor of deformation in said bottles, which is the thermal deformation caused by the contraction of the constructive material of said bottles during the cooling process of the bottled product.
Since the distribution of the material along the wall o
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Garbe Stephen P.
McDonald Christopher J.
Rhodia-Ster Fipack S.A.
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