Case Study: Plastic Technologies Inc achieves lightweighting, cost savings and faster time-to-market with Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA (Abaqus)

Plastic Technologies Inc - Customer Case Study

Plastic Technologies Inc (PTI), a leader in plastic packaging design, needed a more cost‑effective, faster alternative to extensive physical prototyping to support heavy workloads and a rigorous campaign to lightweight PET containers and diagnose product failures. To address this, PTI adopted Dassault Systemes solutions—using SIMULIA/Abaqus alongside CATIA and its proprietary virtual‑prototyping tools—to simulate reheating, blow‑molding, thickness distribution and the nonlinear deformation of containers.

By integrating Dassault Systemes’ SIMULIA (Abaqus) with its in‑house tools, PTI rapidly screened and optimized designs, preform parameters and production processes, reducing development cost and accelerating time to market. Measurable outcomes included simulation predictions within ~90% of physical test results, identification that top‑load strength fell from 19 lbf to 12 lbf when trimming a bottle from 17 g to 14 g (guiding redesigns), and solving a failure by changing logo geometry instead of heavy‑weighting—delivering faster iterations, better troubleshooting and a clear competitive edge.

Plastic Technologies Inc

Sumit Mukherjee

Director, CAE & Simulation