Environmental conditions can affect packaging materials, seals, components and overall pack performance during storage, transport and use. Testing under controlled conditions can help assess these effects, investigate performance issues and support packaging development and validation programmes.
Our environmental testing capabilities include:
- High and low temperature testing
- High humidity exposure
- Temperature and humidity cycling
- Thermal shock testing
- Controlled environmental conditioning for wider packaging test programmes
Environmental testing for distribution
For packaging that needs to be evaluated under storage and distribution conditions, Smithers also provides environmental conditioning and testing for complete packs, transit packaging and palletised loads through our distribution testing laboratories.
Environmental exposure can be incorporated into broader shipment simulation and distribution testing programmes, alongside hazards such as vibration, shock and compression, to evaluate packaging performance under conditions representative of the supply chain.
Explore our Distribution Testing services for further information.
Temperature and humidity testing
Smithers has a range of controlled environmental chambers for testing at high and low temperatures, high humidity and under temperature and humidity cycling conditions.
One application is the accelerated ageing of medical packaging at elevated temperatures based on ASTM F1980 Standard Guide for Accelerated Aging of Sterile Medical Device Packages. The degradation of packaging materials is assumed to follow the kinetics described by the Arrhenius reaction rate function.
Temperature cycling can be used where changing conditions provide a more representative assessment, while the effects of humidity may also need to be considered in some shelf-life and packaging performance studies.
Smithers is UKAS ISO 17025 accredited for:
- High and low temperature testing in accordance with BS EN 60068-2-1:1993 and BS EN 60068-2-2:1993 respectively
- Humidity testing to BS EN 60068-2-30:1999 and BS EN 60068-2-38:1999.
Thermal shock testing
Thermal shock testing assesses the resistance of packs and materials to rapid changes in temperature. Test specimens are exposed to a specified number of temperature cycles between low and high temperatures to evaluate their response to sudden thermal changes.
Thermal shock testing to BS EN 60068-2-14:2000 and environmental stress testing of machine-readable passports as detailed in ICAO Document WG 3TF4 N0232 Version 3.2 are UKAS ISO 17025 accredited.
Talk to our experts about the environmental conditions, packaging system or performance requirement you need to evaluate.
