PRESS RELEASE

PHARMACEUTICAL WATER VAPOUR INSTRUMENTATION
Fast accurate measurement of the World’s most damaging contaminant – and its most beneficial!

Versaperm Limited, a world leader in water vapour permeability is launching an entirely new instrument for the fast and accurate measurement of water vapour permeability – which is both the world’s most damaging pharmaceutical contaminant and the most beneficial.

Water vapour is omnipresent and highly invasive. It can cause drugs to de-activate and aerosols to clog. It can stimulate or prohibit biological processes and spoiling processes yet it is vital for sterilisation and a plethora of medical uses.

Using materials with inappropriate vapour permeabilities costs the UK alone considerably over £100M every year and needlessly reduces the active life and effectiveness of a huge range of preparations.

The Versaperm WVTR (Water Vapour Transmission) MK VI meters’ highly automated computerised control can cope with several samples at a time - and still give a reading in as little as 30 minutes for some materials. The conventionally gravimetric measurement technique takes several days and gives significantly less accurate / reproducible results.

Additionally the instrument can be configured to measure the diffusion rates of most gaseous elements (water, O₂, CO₂ etc). The MK VI needs very little re-calibration and requires, at most, minimal training to give results that can be accurate to better than one part per million (with some samples a few parts per hundred million). Sensitivities are typically in the range 0.05 - 3200g/m2/day.

A wide variety of options is available, depending on the specific applications, but both single and multi-sample systems, plus a range of measurement chambers and sensors can be supplied for testing samples from the size of a thimble up to a pallet load and beyond.

As well as vapour transmission, the equipment can be used to measure the Equilibrium Relative Humidity (ERH) of substances - that might otherwise be decomposed by normal water content measuring techniques.

The company also operates a laboratory service to measure permeability for companies where the volume or logistics of measurements does not demand a dedicated instrument.