A computer‐aided methodology to design safe food packaging and related systems

Abstract

A specific "Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis" (FMECA) methodology has been developed to detect substances, materials, and steps that are critical for the safety of packaging systems used in food contact and related applications. Contamination levels in the finished product beyond acceptable thresholds are screened via a systematic analysis of crossed mass transfer between components and a serialization of mass-transfer instances during product lifetime. The whole framework, including physical modeling and expert systems, has been integrated within the open-source simulation software FMECAengine. The whole approach is illustrated on three case studies representative of applications along the food packaging supply chain: (1) identification of critical routes of the contamination by printing ink constituents, (2) concurrent engineering of multipurpose packaging, and (3) application to surveys or control plans. The implementation of this framework within industrial commitments such as compliance with EU regulations and ISO 22000 type food safety management systems is discussed.

Rational Design of Packaging: Toward Safer and Ecodesigned Food Packaging Systems

“…Equations (1–3) (13–6) have been implemented by following the finite-volume formulation of Nguyen et al (2013) and the opensource project FMECAengine (Vitrac, 2018).…”

“…For food packaging, the chief question is how to maximize shelf-life while minimizing packaging weight in worst-case storage and transport conditions (min-max problem). Additional problems of minimization, such as mitigating migration issues of intentionally-added substances, can also be considered during packaging design as shown by Nguyen et al (2013). The considered degrees of freedom are various, they include the choice of the materials, their formulation and industrial practices along the supply chain; but only the packaging shape and wall thicknesses are common to all mass transfer problems: mass loss, migration issues, aroma scalping, oxidation, etc.…”

“…By taking the example of alcoholic beverages stored in PET bottles as a representative case study, a tailored and more systematic methodology is proposed to solve, holistically, several mass transfer problems impacting the amount of wastes, the shelf-life of the product and food safety issues. The developments must be seen as an extension of safe-by-design concepts already applied to food packaging (Nguyen et al, 2013). The proposed multiscale modeling, simulation, and optimization framework reuses indeed several mass transfer simulation components of the open-source project FMECAengine (Vitrac, 2018).…”

The influence of the concentration: Variable diffusivity on the mass transfer from a polymer into a liquid

“…The mathematical model widely used to describe this phenomenon is limited to the diffusion in the packaging considering the concentrations of the contaminants in the food gradientless. Concretely, it consists of the following: The diffusion of the migration species inside the packaging material is described by the 1D Fick's second law with constant diffusion coefficients. A Robin‐type boundary condition at the interface between the packaging material and the food models the transport of the migration species in the food. The other boundary of the packaging material is considered an impervious boundary or a symmetric plane boundary condition. …”

“…Note that in Brandsch et al and Nguyen et al the case of the multilayer packaging was considered while in Goujot and Vitrac, the sorption/desorption isotherms at the solid‐fluid interface were assumed nonlinear. Recently, Pigeonneau et al proposed a mathematical model that takes into account for the contaminant the unsteady diffusion in the packaging and the laminar flow advection/diffusion in the food.…”