This article presents a modified configuration of the box compression test (BCT), which reflects the actual behavior of the vegetable or fruit trays during transport and storage. In traditional load capacity tests, trays are treated as classic transport boxes, i.e., they are compressed between two rigid plates, which does not take into account the specific geometry of this type of packaging. Both the boundary conditions and the loads acting on the tray were modified. The paper presents the concept of a new test, as well as numerical models and a sensitivity analysis of the modified BCT to the basic geometrical dimensions of the tray. The conducted research clearly shows that the proposed configuration of the load-bearing capacity test of a tray is closer to the actual operation of the packaging. As a result, most of the parameters that are not active under the conditions of the classical BCT become more important in the new configuration, which corresponds to the observations on the real performance of the packaging.
Keywords: corrugated board; finite element method; fruit and vegetable tray; sensitivity analysis; top-to-bottom box compression test.