Best Ways to Perform the Box Compression Test Accurately

If you are working in a packaging company, you might know the importance of corrugated boxes in the packaging industry. It is considered as the widely used and safest means of packaging. It is used in multiple industries to fulfill the purpose of packaging goods safely and properly. With the wide usage of corrugated boxes in different industries, it is important for the manufacturer to test the properties of the boxes before selling it to the manufacturers for packaging purposes. It is mandatory for the corrugated boxes to be strong enough to ensure the safety of the product during storage and transportation. Measuring the compression strength is one of the prominent properties of the corrugated boxes that is used to measure the maximum compression force that a corrugated box can tolerate to its maximum.

The best way to test the compression strength of the boxes is to use the box compression tester or BCT. The testing equipment applies a load on the top / external surface of the corrugated boxes from the top using the compression plates. This helps to measure how the products will perform when subjected to actual working conditions such as storage, warehousing, stacking during transportation and more.
How does the testing machine work?

A compression testing compresses the material vertically. It applies force on both sides of the material i.e. from the bottom and from the top by placing a sample between the two parallel plates. Thus, with the help of the Pacorr’s Box Compression Tester, you can easily determine the box compression of various packaging materials.

Continuing the discussion in this blog, we are going to provide you with the information about how you can do a box compression test. What are the best ways of performing a compression test. Let’s get started.

How to perform the compression test on corrugated boxes accurately?

Box compression tester is designed keeping in mind the national and international standard test methods which ensures that it will only offer precise test results. The machine is provided with two wide horizontal plates that are equipped parallelly one above the other which allows the users to test the sample of different sizes. Once the sample is placed between the plates and the test is initiates, slowly the plates start coming near to each other to apply compression force on the sample with the help of a load cell and at the stage when the box deforms or got ruptured, machine will instantly record the readings and display the maximum load that the box has tolerated before deforming.

But when performing the compression test, you need to be extra cautious and need to take certain steps to ensure that you are performing the test accurately and will get only precise test results. A few of them are:

• Make sure that the box is intact and all the sides of the corrugated box are perfectly closed. If not, securing it using adhesive / tapes is the best idea.
• Plug your compression tester in a 15 amp/ 220 V AC plug to provide the right amount of power to your device.
• Using the rotary switch of the machine, bring the compression plates closer to the sample to avoid wasting time with an increasing speed of 50mm/min.
• Apply a preload of 1 - 2 Kgf on the sample to remove any air gap between the compression plate and the sample.

Keeping certain things in mind you can easily perform the test and in an accurate manner.

For more information, contact Pacorr Testing Instruments.