Measure the mechanical properties of packaging

Measuring the mechanical properties of packaging plays a pivotal role for a multitude of reasons.

Firstly, the mechanical properties of such materials are crucial in determining their resilience to stress and ability to resist deformation. This becomes indispensable in ensuring packaging integrity throughout transportation, storage, and handling phases.

A breach in this integrity could lead to leakage, spoilage, or even contamination, translating to not only product wastage but also potential health risks. Beyond just maintaining integrity, these properties also influence the packaging's capacity to shield the packaging content from detrimental external factors like moisture, oxygen, light, and microbial threats.

By gauging these properties, manufacturers can enhance their packaging designs and cherry-pick materials that furnish optimal protection for the encased items.

Another facet is consumer safety. If packaging turns out to be overly brittle or excessively flexible, there's a risk it might shatter or rupture during use, posing injury risks to the user.

Mechanical property evaluation can thus guide manufacturers to produce packaging that's both safe and consumer-friendly. Furthermore, numerous countries have set regulatory frameworks necessitating packaging to adhere to specific mechanical standards. Hence, by assessing these properties, manufacturers can ensure alignment with such regulations, sidestepping potential legal complications and associated financial repercussions.

In essence, the assessment of mechanical properties in packaging is not just a quality assurance step, but a fundamental requirement for ensuring the safety, quality, and regulatory conformity of products.

In the packaging industry, the structural integrity and mechanical properties of packaging materials play a crucial role in preserving the freshness, safety, and quality of the item contained within. The use of a Texture Analyser to assess these mechanical properties provides several key advantages for the industry:

• Ensuring product protection: By measuring properties such as tensile strength or puncture resistance, manufacturers can ensure that the packaging is robust enough to protect its contents from external damages during transportation and handling.
• Shelf life enhancement: The mechanical integrity of seals in vacuum-sealed or airtight packaging can be assessed, ensuring that the product, e.g. food, inside remains fresh for longer by preventing air or contaminant intrusion.
• Optimising seal strength: For packages with resealable features, a Texture Analyser can measure the force required to open and reseal the package, ensuring ease of use for consumers while maintaining, in the case of food, product freshness.
• Consumer experience: The ease of opening, such as the force needed to tear open a snack bag directly impacts the consumer experience. By quantifying this, manufacturers can strike a balance between user-friendliness and packaging security.
• Sustainability considerations: With the push for more sustainable packaging materials, assessing the mechanical properties of biodegradable or recyclable materials ensures they meet the required standards without compromising on e.g.food protection.
• Compliance with standards: Various regulatory bodies may set specific standards for packaging to ensure safety and prevent contamination. Using a Texture Analyser ensures that packaging adheres to these standards.
• Product development and innovation: For manufacturers developing new types of packaging, a Texture Analyser can assist in evaluating prototypes, enabling innovations that cater to modern consumer needs, such as portability or single-use servings.
• Quality control and batch consistency: Ensuring consistent mechanical properties across production batches is vital for maintaining the reliability of packaging. Regular testing provides quality assurance.
• Predicting wear and tear: By simulating potential stressors, such as compression during stacking or abrasion during transport, manufacturers can get insights into potential wear and tear, leading to design improvements.
• Claims substantiation: If a packaging claims to be "extra strong" or "easy tear," these claims can be empirically validated using a Texture Analyser, bolstering trust and credibility.
• Economic efficiency: By understanding the mechanical properties and optimising them, wastage due to overuse of materials can be minimised. This leads to cost savings and a reduced environmental footprint.

By leveraging the capabilities of a Texture Analyser, manufacturers can optimise the design and material selection for packaging, ensuring it not only protects the item inside but also provides a positive user experience, from transportation to the consumer's use.

A Texture Analyser can assess a plethora of mechanical properties vital for the quality, functionality, and durability of packaging.

Here are some of the key mechanical properties that can be measured for packaging:

Understanding these mechanical properties using a Texture Analyser is pivotal for packaging developers and manufacturers. It ensures the selection of the most suitable materials and designs, ultimately providing optimal protection to the product, ensuring consumer safety, and minimising product loss due to packaging failures.

Whether its providing the solution for Shanghai Jiaotong University  to measure the tensile strength in their composite preservative film patent, allowing Tianjin University to measure the elongation at break of their oxidation resistant edible packaging film or offering scientists a method to measuring cling adhesion for their polyethylene resin film, a materials testing instrument is adaptable and flexible in its application to measure the bespoke mechanical properties of your product and then enable its quality to be controlled in your manufacturing to guarantee consistency and customer satisfaction.

With deep expertise in the physical property measurement of your materials, we’re well equipped to support innovation in this sector – just ask our customers.

A wide range of probes and attachments can be integrated with our instruments, allowing testing to be precisely adapted to the material or product under evaluation. Applications include compression tests to determine the strength of box materials, tensile tests to measure the force required to remove a beverage can ring pull, and the use of a Volscan Profiler to capture detailed packaging dimensional profiles.

Over the years, we have collaborated with leading scientists and organisations across diverse industries to design and refine fixtures that meet highly specific testing requirements. When a suitable solution does not already exist, we develop one – expanding our portfolio of Community Registered Designs and reinforcing our commitment to innovation in solving complex testing challenges.

The examples provided illustrate a selection of specialised attachments and commonly performed measurements in this application area. This list is not exhaustive; a wide range of additional options are available for the testing of food packaging. All instruments in the Texture Analyser range can be used to perform the tests described.

Exponent Connect software includes a comprehensive range of test methods for packaging, all instantly accessible at the click of a button. We streamline your mechanical property testing process, ensuring faster access to methods and ready-to-use analysis files for your product properties.

The packaging industry continually evolves to meet consumer demands, improve sustainability, and incorporate new technologies. Here are some of the newer ingredient and product ideas in packaging research, development, and production and a typical academic reference to show how the Texture Analyser has already being applied: