Accelerating life testing for food packaging. A case study of Italian oil-for-food distribution

Accelerating life testing analyses deal with products subject to failure and stressed over nominal operating conditions in order to quickly capture reliability parameters under stress and indirectly estimate them during nominal conditions. A few studies have been conducted on accelerating life testing applied to packaging design. Literature does not present results on the measurement of the effects of temperature, the typical stress parameter, on different bottles of oil for food. The food packages can differ for the content of the bottle, e.g. extra virgin olive oil, rice oil and vinacciolo oil, for the type of bottle (e.g. glass or plastic), for the closure adopted (plastic or aluminium caps) or the presence/absence of the cap cover. For different combinations of these factors an expected value of life duration given a specific stress value, also including the use/nominal operating stress, can be estimated. A case study is illustrated and the obtained results for different packages are discussed.