ODOUR PROBLEM IN FLEXIBLE PACKAGING MATERIALS

Abstract

These days packaging food market not only in India but also in all over world is increasing rapidly. As we seen that mostly food products available in market are packed by packaging materials. Packaged food products are transported all over world which takes some time ranging from few to many days, for this purpose we should consider about safety and quality of the food products. As my thesis title is “Odour Problem in Flexible Packaging Materials” my work is to find out that what are the main causes of odour in flexible packaging material and what is intensity of odour in different packaging film. Off-odour may be classified as a common type of failure. Base packaging material can itself contain solvent residues either from coatings or where the base packaging material that is laminated from an adhesive. Such solvent residues can be ethyl acetate, toluene and THF, all of which have strong odours. Printing Ink also often contain solvents with well-defined odours. To find out the value of solvent retention and intensity of odour we have performed the Gas- Chromatography and Jar-Odour test. we have performed the GC test for 8 samples, out of which 5 were monolayer and rest were double layer. After the operation of GC, we have compared the obtained value of solvent retention of following chemicals EA, IPA, MIBK, MEK, Toluene, Ethanol and N Propyl acetate with permissible value provided by Uflex Private Limited and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). After comparison we have found that the obtained values of solvent retention was much lower than the permissible values, hence the obtained result is satisfactory. After that we have performed the Jar-odour test for the same 8 samples, odour in monolayer samples found to be comparatively lower than the double layer samples and intensity level in all the 8 samples are below objectionable level and results are acceptable.