Experimental and numerical performance of corrugated fibreboard at different orientations under four-point bending test

This paper presents experimental work, finite element (FE) model, and analytical solution for predicting the four-point bending on C-flute corrugated fibreboard (CFB) when oriented at different angles. The angles of the CFB samples used in this research study were 0 degrees (cross-machine direction) and 30 degrees, 45 degrees, 60 degrees, and 90 degrees (machine direction). The CFB was assumed as an orthotropic shell element in the FE model and was validated by comparing the bending stiffness, maximum bending force, and failure formation from the experimental test. It was found in the experiment that the 90 degrees sample had the highest bending stiffness with the lowest maximum bending force while the 0 degrees sample had the opposite. An interesting finding was that the 30 degrees and 45 degrees samples improve the bending stiffness than does 0 degrees without significantly affecting the maximum bending force. Both the FE model and analytical solution predicted the bending stiffness trend of the board from 0 degrees to 90 degrees with good agreement compared with experimental results. The maximum bending force in the FE model showed reasonable agreement with the experimental findings. The failure regions on the samples showed similar patterns in both experiments and the FE model. The accurate response in the FE model justify that it is a good tool to predict the bending behaviour of CFB.