The total production costs of PET bottles are significantly affected by the costs of raw material. Approximately 70 % of the total costs are spent for the raw material. Therefore, stretch-blow molding industry intends to reduce the total production costs by an optimized material efficiency. However, there is often a trade-off between an optimized material efficiency and required product properties. Due to a multitude of complex boundary conditions, the design process of new stretch-blow molded products is still a challenging task and is often based on empirical knowledge. Application of current CAE-tools supports the design process by reducing development time and costs. This paper describes an approach to determine optimized preform geometry and corresponding process parameters iteratively. The wall thickness distribution and the local stretch ratios of the blown bottle are calculated in a three-dimensional process simulation. Thereby, the wall thickness distribution is correlated with an objective function and preform geometry as well as process parameters are varied by an optimization algorithm. Taking into account the correlation between material usage, process history and resulting product properties, integrative coupled simulation steps, e.g. structural analyses or barrier simulations, are performed. The approach is applied on a 0.5 liter PET bottle of Krones AG, Neutraubling, Germany. The investigations point out that the design process can be supported by applying this simulative optimization approach. In an optimization study the total bottle weight is reduced from 18.5 g to 15.5 g. The validation of the computed results is in progress.
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