Sterilization and the packaging of dressings, medical and pharmaceutical products

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With worldwide sales of wound dressings alone now reaching around $3.3 billion globally there has never been so great a need to check that the packaging does its job. It usually needs to allow high temperature steam through to sterilise the content, but then needs to keep contaminants out.
The critical factor is the packaging’s vapour permeability. Versaperm, a world leader in water vapour permeability has launched an entirely new instrument to measure this both quickly and accurately.

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 conventional 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.

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.

ENDS