After spending countless hours of innovation, perfection and hard work, you’re finally ready to ship your product out to your customers. However, your packaging’s integrity must hold up to the rigorous conditions it will be subjected to during transit. This includes a significant change in pressure during air freight shipping which can damage the packaging and possibly expose your product to contamination. This is why reliable sealed product testing in a vacuum environment is critical.
Among the most reliable and cost-effective package leak testing methods available is vacuum chamber testing. Vacuum chamber package testing is a non-destructive alternative to water immersion leak test and can be used on a wide range of non-porous flexible, rigid and semi-rigid packages.
When using a vacuum chamber to test your products, the package is placed inside a vacuum sealer and the sealing nozzles are then positioned over the open end of the container to create the necessary vacuum. When comparing this to traditional pitot-style static testers that require you to insert the probe directly into the packaging, it’s clear that vacuum chamber package testing is much faster and simpler to operate.
The simplest method is spraying the chamber with pure helium gas and then measuring the time taken for the pump to return the pressure to its originally evacuated level after the helium has been released. This method is not as accurate as other leak detection technologies as ambient helium concentrations and other internal background signals may impact the results. A modern helium leak detector can take this into consideration and compensate for this in order to provide the most accurate results possible.