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ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products
ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products
ArcelorMittal’s Global R&D team shone a light on their capabilities in collaborating with customers on sustainable steel closures and 3-piece can bodies earlier this year in two dedicated webinars hosted by The Canmaker and presented by Gilles Mangin, Packaging Product Development Engineer, ArcelorMittal Global R&D.
“The world of steel closure solutions is diverse and challenging, offering everything from easy-open ends, twist-off caps to crown cork and that is what we have seen in our first webinar” says Gilles.
“The real challenge? It is to find the right compromise between reliability, convenience and sustainability. How do we and our customers ensure closures withstand sterilisation, remain easy for consumers to open and minimise material use and impacts without sacrificing performance? Our Global R&D technical teams work on these challenges day-by-day, so if you want a new cutting-edge steel packaging solution… we are here to collaborate and offer our expertise”.
In our second webinar Gilles presented solutions for 3-piece can bodies, the core component for food, aerosol and general line steel packaging. “In fact, the 3-piece can body represents around 2/3 of the total metal packaging weight. It is used in a variety of packaging forms going from the tiny 1/10 food can to the big pail can” says Gilles.
In his presentation Gilles Mangin described the importance of reliability and material usage in packaging, including downgauging, as innovation and lightweighting of 3-piece can bodies have been a motto of the steel packaging industry for a while now. “Nowadays with the need to keep on reducing the environmental footprint of any packaging, the path is far from reaching its end” underlined Gilles.
Gilles explains in the webinars that at the heart of ArcelorMittal's collaborative approach are its advanced digitalisation capabilities and R&D tools (for example 3D scanner and meshing using Zeiss® and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) supported by Abaqus®). Digitalisation can reduce the time taken to scope out the geometry of a new component from seven days down to one day. Ultimately such advances can significantly speed up product development, slash time-to-market and minimise trial and error.
Under the EU’s REACH legislation, Chromium Cr(VI) chemicals must be eliminated from the existing tinplate passivation process by 2027. ArcelorMittal has been preparing for the change for some time, and has built up its Chromium-Free Passivation Alternative (CFPA) production capacity to accommodate full customer demand from 2025, a year or more ahead of the deadline. So if your products are affected by REACH the clock is ticking to take action.
Do you want to know more? Read our full article on CFPA here.
We are ready to offer you our expertise in co-developing your future products.
Do not hesitate to contact us for more information.
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