IPST’s Roman Popil presented a paper at the October 2013 TAPPI CorrExpo conference in Indianapolis.  The presentation, titled "The BCT of Copy Paper Boxes - Applying McKee's Formula" is based on a specialty testing project for a major paper manufacturing client.

The original "McKee equation" for predicting box compression strength was published by IPC in 1963 and has remained in use. Dr. Popil’s talk showed how a popular simplified form of the equation can be applied to the special case of copy paper boxes by fitting the constants of the equation to experimental data obtained.  The result is that the client is able to discriminate the stacking performance of copy paper boxes through a box compression test prediction based on some simple measurements.

At IPST, Dr. Popil manages the Paper Analysis Lab (PAL) focused on assisting industry customers with troubleshooting quality issues, product development or optimization through physical properties characterization.  The PAL also develops new instrumentation and test methods.

Dr. Popil was the principal investigator for the Engineered Packaging and Products elective research consortium project.  The project resulted in published articles on a predictive model for corrugated board performance, corrugated board shear, and compression strength measurement techniques, and the development and evaluation of wax replacement coatings for corrugated containers.

Dr. Popil earned his PhD in experimental plasma physics from the University of British Columbia.  He has been granted three patents and authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications.

The presentation and the accompanying article from the October TAPPI CorrExpo, can be found at:
http://ipst.gatech.edu/faculty/popil_roman/newsletters/The%20BCT%20of%20Copy%20Paper%20Boxes.pdf

http://ipst.gatech.edu/faculty/popil_roman/newsletters/Box%20Compression%20for%20Copy%20Paper%20Boxes%20-%20Applying%20McKee's%20Formula%20%20-final.pdf