With more attention paid by the government and the public, sense of safety of consumer goods including food and pharmaceuticals has been raised gradually. As companies concentrate on the packed content, quality control of packaging material is ignored. However, quality control of packaging material has critical affect to the quality of product. Additionally, sound quality control of packaging may also bring great economical benefits for manufacturers of consumer product.
CONVEN provides professional packaging safety solutions from the perspective of packaging materials.
Package failure in stacking and package sealing failure are two common packaging problems. Package shall be designed with sufficient ability to withstand the stacking in transport and storage, or package failure may occur. There are many forms of package sealing failure, such as sealing being not tight, opening at the sealing, gas or liquid leakage at the bottle mouth, cap cracking of plastic bottle, etc. Both problems can cause the packed content to become damp, oxidized, or contaminated by foreign matters, and further packed content will be deteriorated or get mildewed.
There are two main sources for above problems: packaging design and packaging material.
1. Packaging design. For example, if net weight or volume of packed content exceeds the bearing range of the packaging material, package may break or crack when affected by external force during transport and sales.
2. Packaging material. Following are some factors of packaging material quality problem that may cause package failure in stacking or package seal failure.
1) Low physical and mechanical performance. For example, flexible package, due to low flexibility and puncture resistance to packed content, high frangibility, weak compression strength, and low impact resistance to external matters, may break, or crack at the sealing area during storage, transport and sales. In addition, if packaging material is poor in cold resistance, its physical and mechanical property may reduce in low temperature environment to certain level at which brittle fracture is liable to occur at the sealing area or other parts of the package.
2) Poor seal performance. For example, if packaging material is over heat sealed, inner sealing edge may break; while if heat seal strength is too low, seal crack may occur. If torque of cap is improper, leaking problem tends to appear at the bottle mouth.
Besides, improper stacking of package containing packed content, such as exceeding stacking layers and non-uniform distribution of compressing load, may also increase percentage of failed package.
As to the packaging design, package dimensions shall be determined based on the weight or volume of packed content, or decide the weight or volume of packed content according to the package size and withstanding ability to packed content.
As to the packaging, CONVEN provides a complete packaging safety solution. From the quality control of purchased packaging material, CONVEN helps to select suppliers and improve packaging processing techniques, aiming to prevent any package failure in stacking due to packaging quality problems. The solution consists of:
1) Physical and mechanical performance of packaging material. For example, tensile strength and elongation rate at break, puncture resistance, pendulum impact resistance, peel resistance, etc, which in combination can be used to evaluate whether the physical properties of package such as flexibility, puncture resistance and impact resistance can meet the requirements of packing, storing, stacking and transport.
2) Seal performance. Burst pressure test can be used to determine the failure position and the weakest part of package in mechanical strength. Heat seal strength test is able to determine whether the heat seal strength of package meets the requirement of packed content, find out the poor sealing area, and measure the uniformity of heat sealing performance. Torque test can be used to measure weather the tightness of cap can prevent the occurrence of leaking problem.
Through performance test, quality control of packaging material can be generally achieved, and thus package failure in staking due to inferior quality of packaging material can be avoided. Consequently, integrity of package containing product can be guaranteed, and any quality problems of packed content caused by package failure are not going to occur.
Consisting of high precision intelligent testing instruments developed by Labthink, CONVEN Information System, and complete solutions for testing, diagnosis, quality analysis and quality control, CONVEN is a consulting packaging test service system, and has profound social value in respect of cost saving of plastic flexible packages consuming companies, product quality improving, food and pharmaceuticals safety guaranteeing.
