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Testing Product Moisture Sensitivity
How to tell if your product is sensitive to moisture?
Launching a new product line has many challenges - coming up with the idea and funding, lining up manufacturers and packaging copackers, logistics, etc. Small details like the ideal storage environment to maximize shelf life are sometimes left till the last minute. For some products like electronics, you can be sure there is a need for extremely low relative humidity to ensure the components are not damaged. For others, the exact needs might not be self-evident.
IMPAK Moisture Testing Services
"We ARE Biotech Support"
- Test with us for $525*
* Comparable labs charge over $1500
Not sure about how to tell what Relative Humidity (RH) you need to avoid? Contact IMPAK about our new Relative Humidity testing service today. Give us your product, complete with your packaging and desiccant(s) of choice. We will monitor your actual in-package environment through real-world cross-country shipping to map moisture levels while traveling. This provides a sense of the standard shipping environment the product should expect. We can see temperature, humidity, and other factors change as it is shipped back and forth so you can see how your packaging plans stack up, and make adjustments before a full product launch.
Hydrolyzation
For some coatings and ingredients, the presence of moisture can lead to irreversible damage to the component or chemical ingredient. When something sensitive to moisture is exposed to a high enough Relative Humidity, you can sometimes see the process of Hydolyzation.
Hydrolysis is a chemical reaction that involves the breaking of a chemical bond by the addition of water molecules. When this occurs, it can lead to changes in the properties of a substance, which can impact a company's product in several ways. For food products that contain fats, oils, or lyophilized ingredients, hydrolysis can cause their base ingredients to break down into smaller molecules. This can affect the flavor, texture, and nutritional value of the product - as well as shorten the shelf life. For pharmaceutical products, moisture can cause degradation of the active ingredients in the drug, leading to reduced effectiveness or even harmful side effects. This can also be of great concern for things like microwell plates - where small reactive components are held in a vacuum - any errant moisture in the storage container can lead to slight changes in the chemical reactions. In cases like these, the only way to avoid issues is to avoid dealing with moisture altogether.
It is important for companies to monitor the effects of hydrolysis on their products and take steps to mitigate any negative impacts, such as by using Sorbent Systems like Molecular Sieve Desiccants, product stabilizers, and/or preservatives to prevent hydrolysis from occurring.
Corrosion
For products/parts made of metal, the safe ranges of relative humidity might be a little wider, but the consequences are no less dire.
Corrosion is the process of deteriorating materials due to chemical reactions with their environment. Especially for parts using ferrous metals, a relative humidity climbing up to 40-60% can cause corrosion to start occurring even during transit and storage. This means a shorter lifespan of the product as a whole, along with increased maintenance costs and safety concerns. Ultimately if the product inside cannot handle the natural environment it is shipped in, the more likely you are to run into issues with your product and your reputation. To avoid any more costly issues down the road, outfitting your packaging with sorbent pouches like Silica Gel can help keep the relative humidity well below corrosive levels.
Let IMPAK Corporation test your pouches!
Getting a sense of what environments your product will find itself in during shipping can be complicated. Especially when the moisture senstivity is high or even not known, finding the right balance of sorbents can be a time-consuming process. Leveraging our decades of experience we came up with a simple but effective test we now open to our clients. Using a custom suite of testing equipment we can send your product packaged as intended to ship cross-country with sensors recording the environment as it travels. This can act as an informal test to see how the product fares after shipping in terms of moisture damage, as well as provide a baseline expectation of the relative humidity you will be dealing with. From there we can offer suggestions on what kind of barrier film and/or sorbent system you will need to reach your target RH levels as compared to the real-world data. For anyone who looks at the cost of running this test, this can be a cost-saving measure in the long term for anyone whose project might be ruined by excess moisture levels. Compared to tests offered by many professional labs that charge starting around $1500, the IMPAK testing service offers an important element of testing at a much more approachable level.