Creep study of expanded polystyrene used in Refrigerator packaging

The efficient staging and storing of home appliances in warehouses are critical to avoid human injuries and huge losses to the company. After manufacturing the packaged product needs to be stored for a particular duration in the warehouse before it’s shipped out to suppliers. For optimum space management, those products are stacked one over the other. So it is important to have a robust packaging design to ensure even distribution of stacked product loads maintains their stability. Considering the constant loading over a longer period there is a high possibility of creep effects in packaging material, and it becomes even more crucial when packaging material is Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). So it's imperative to study material creep behavior in designing product packaging. In this study creep behavior of EPS material is evaluated with standard test setup, where precise measurement is done to get creep curves. The results were obtained for long-term constant compressive loading at different stress levels for multiple material densities, at ambient temperature 23°C.