Anéolia gana su 2º Oscar de envasado
- Blog
The awarding of the Oxylos Non Destructive at the 2021 Packaging Award demonstrates the importance given to eco-design by the food industry.
THE CHALLENGES
The measurement of leakage rates is a challenge for the packaging industry, particularly the food industry.
In fact, in a context of market change that is pushing the search for new materials, bio-sourced for example, or with a low carbon footprint, to produce eco-designed packaging, the industry must have new information to compare the improvement brought about by these new solutions and their effects on the preservation of foodstuffs and the environmental impact.
The evolution of the regulation aiming at a reduction of preservatives in food, while seeking, due to demographic/logistical pressure, an increase in preservation time, is a challenge when the industry seeks to reduce the weight of plastic.
This dynamic motivates the search for complex composite film solutions, whose technical properties, such as permeability alone, are difficult to integrate into the determination of shelf life, if the ability of the industrial tool to form and seal them properly is not taken into account.
In essence, the defects generated by the packaging process (sealing jaws, friction, film tension, product deposition, etc.) are all factors that generate defects and can seriously compromise efforts to find a mechanical or chemical barrier to gas exchange.
Relevant metrology, minimising the influencing variables, is becoming the essential tool for evaluating the performance of previous solutions with new ones.
It is through this metrology and the analysis of these new data that the industrialist can evaluate, contract, commit, and contribute to the establishment of confidence in the entire value chain by including the consumer.
HOW DOES NON-DESTRUCTIVE OXYLOS DIFFER FROM THE ORDINARY LEAKAGE MEASUREMENT OFFER?
Firstly, there are standards in Europe that describe the best techniques for assessing the hermeticity of flexible packaging. Where the ASTM standards give an indication of certain measurement technique performance, the DIN55508 standards give methods for implementing the most commonly used techniques on flexible packaging. These standards are intended to provide the best lessons learned and give the flexibility to better agree on the method to be used for a given application and purpose.
As with the entire range of leakage measurement equipment at Aneolia, the Oxylos meets the criteria defined in DIN55508-1, the first reference standard that aligns the market supply of instruments with the correct dimensioning of the leakage measurement. This standard, expressed in the international standard, must take into account the stress pressures exerted and the quantities of air escaping from the packaging envelope in a given time: a time, a stress, a quantity lost, that is the very definition of the leak.
