An investigation into a foldable freight container for shipping industry

Abstract

This work proposes a foldable concept incorporating one side of the freight container to be hinged to the base and the other side hinged to the top, forming a “L” like foldable structure, hence the name Double L foldable freight container. This design of foldable freight container is proposed to address the issues of trade imbalance between countries or regions due to presence of vast number of empty freight containers.

The foldable container is designed to carry a maximum payload of 24000kg, inclusive of its own tare weight, and must satisfy the structural testing stated in the ISO regulations to be qualified as structurally strong and safe to be used in the market. The physical specifications and system compatibility of the Double L foldable freight container must align with the specifications regulated by ISO standards.

A systematic design process is adopted in this project, and the major phases include introduction to the problems and objectives of the project, conceptual design, embodiment design, cost estimation, strength and weight analysis. Various engineering software packages were used to aid the calculations and presentations of this project.

Throughout the report, comparisons between the new type of foldable freight container design and standard 20ft ISO freight container were conducted to present a better picture of the advantages and disadvantages of the new design concept.