Hiral Makwana's Research

Biography:

"Hiral Makwana is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials. She completed her Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech in December 2025, under the supervision of Dr. Eduardo Molina.

Prior to her graduate studies, she worked as a Global Category Sourcing Specialist in the Energy Procurement and Network Managed Services department at Vodafone, India, where she supported strategic sourcing and procurement activities across global supply chain operations. She earned her bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Ganpat University, India.

Hiral is a Certified Scrum Master (SMC ®) and a Certified Packaging Professional in Training (CPIT ®). Since August 2024, she has been working in the Corrugated Materials Testing Laboratory, part of the Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design (CPULD), where she conducts comprehensive IKEA testing of corrugated board and load bearers." 

Research Abstract:

Unit loads, consisting of pallets and corrugated boxes, are one of the primary forms of storage and distribution of packaged products. Although the properties of the corrugated box make it a cost-efficient material to contain and distribute products, the corrugated box’s compression strength can easily be affected by environmental parameters which reduce a box’s effective compression strength. One significant impact on compression strength occurs when a box overhangs the edge of a pallet, causing its corners to be unsupported.

Overhang is frequently caused by pallet gaps, box misalignment, horizontal shock during distribution, or pallet stacking patterns that are designed to improve storage space efficiency. The effects of overhang on box compression strength have been investigated by multiple researchers, but each previous study used different sizes of boxes made from different materials, limiting the broad applicability of the results and challenging strong statistical analysis. 

Due to the described limitations of previous studies, a knowledge gap still exists before we will fully understand the effects of pallet overhang on box compression strength. Therefore, this study has aimed to investigate the effects of pallet overhang on the box compression strength in order to develop a more universal model for predicting the effects of pallet overhang.