| Notes |
Sandia “Rocket Science” Speeds Design of Consumer Products
Why does a multinational manufacturer of consumer products look to Sandia National Laboratories for “rocket science”? Procter &
Gamble (P&G) brands touch about 4.8 billion of the nearly 7 billion people on the planet
today. In order to keep offering innovation to their customers, P&G needs to deliver products that overcome technical contradictions. Some of these products require absorbent materials
including textiles, non-wovens, and paper that are strong, yet soft; that breathe, yet contain liquid; that break, but don’t tear; and that
stretch, but don’t break.
Sandia and P&G have been working together for many years, with an Umbrella Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) in place since 2002. Originally P&G was part of an industry consortium working with Sandia on software that helped model coatings on porous substrates. To further take advantage of Sandia’s expertise in manufacturing thin
film coatings and software modeling, P&G has worked with the Labs on a number of projects targeting technical challenges across the company.
These projects have addressed product performance and, more specifically, the
interaction of liquids with specially designed
porous, absorbent materials in a variety of configurations. They have also had an impact on product manufacturing through process model
designs of everything from paper-making to the deposition of glue beads for product
assembly.
Underpinning every project are the fundamentals of incompressible fluid flow
and transport in deformable porous media. Many of P&G’s products in the Family Care, Home Care, and Baby Care business units are designed to take-up, dispense, store, and distribute liquids for everything from the application of lotions and creams, to personal hygiene, and for cleaning and treating everything from skin to floors. Depending on the performance goals, these products comprise various materials and layers. Most products include some sort of thin-porous sheet which is designed for suction (take-up) or fluid storage, and even rapid distribution.
One recent project has addressed reduced-order modeling capabilities to address thin-porous sheets. Specifically, the project studies how such sheets can be designed to interact with the intended environment (spills, lotions, dirt) and how they manage the liquid through take-up
or expulsion.
Sandia’s approach to the problem is unique. Rather than using a full three-dimensional simulation which is expensive and doesn’t provide much additional accuracy, a unique reduced- order shell model was developed. Shell models are used to reduce the dimensionality of a problem by integrating out some known or analytically determined portion of the solution in one direction (in this case the thin dimension). The result is a formulation that can be solved more expediently on a two-dimensional sheet.
This approach greatly expedites design studies, through rapid throughput models, while maintaining the necessary accuracy. While still under development, the hope is to incorporate the Sandia-developed models as part of the product design process at P&G. |