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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Puncture Test on Pharmaceutical Bottle Seal

The Food and Drug Administration requires that many consumer goods, such as over-the-counter pharmaceutical bottles, be covered by an air-tight seal. This seal prevents harmful liquids, gasses, bacteria, and sometimes light from damaging the contents of the bottle. These seals need to be protective, but still easy for the consumer to open.

Although there have been many advancements to theses seals over the years, some are just down-right difficult to break open. Many times, without the help of a sharp object, users resort to poking the seal with a thumb or index finger - which, if you've tried it, can be rather difficult. Just how difficult is it to poke through these seals?

We put a few bottle seals to the test in our Applications Lab - watch this video!

1 comment:

Frank Lio said...

This is a good test for QC and relative reference data. In real life, the application speeds are non-uniform and many materials are strain rate sensitive so you may want to add a puncture test from an instrumented impact tester to complement. Since many meds have to be refrigerated and considering that material properties for plastics, etc. can change with temperature, testing with a temperature chamber would give a better idea of the ductile to brittle transition point under real usage conditions.