PETpla.net Insider 06 / 2013

BOTTLE MAKING 26 PET planet insider Vol. 14 No. 06/13 www.petpla.net Bottles, preforms and closures, 2nd edition - part 3 Generating the first design in CAD Ottmar Brandau has newly revised his book, “Bottles, pre- forms and closures” first published by hbmedia, and now to be re-issued under the Elsevier imprint. PETplanet insider is publishing extracts from successive chapters in a series of articles in forthcoming issues. After the determination of bottle properties, the next step in product development is the generation of a bottle design in a CAD system or the digitising of sample bottles and moulds. The route taken depends on whether the bottle design already exists or whether a new design is to be cre- ated. The bottle design already exists Sometimes a customer changes his or her mould supplier or requires a new set of moulds for a blowmould- ing machine of a different make. In such cases, moulds are needed for an already-existing bottle design. Yet, this does not automatically mean that the related 3D CAD data on the bottle are also available in a usable form. As a rule, the engineering know-how will remain with the original mould sup- plier, who will not always be willing to hand over CAD data to customers. In