Induction heating is a very common sealing technology for multilayered packaging materials used in liquid food packages, due to its excellent efficiency and reliability. Since the sealing process is critical to ensure package integrity and product protection, it is of fundamental importance to fully understand the physics of such process in order to control power transfer and distribution to the packaging material, as well as to optimize the design of the correspondent sealing components. Induction sealing is a fully coupled multiphysics process where strong interactions between mechanical, electromagnetic and thermal field take place. In this paper we present a hierarchical approach to modelling of induction sealing processes based on finite elements approximation of the coupled field problem and a circuit based representation of the power generation and transfer subsystem, as well as a procedure to obtain a circuit equivalent model of the complete system. Using this approach it is possible to run parametric simulation experiments that are consistent with the detailed description of the physics given by the finite element model, providing a very powerful design and verification tool.
|
22-23 October 2012 Pacengo del Garda 
