Mechanical tester finds leaks in all packaging

Dr Russ Sion, the company's technical director explained that his machine works in a similar manner to existing designs by pushing heads down onto sealed food trays. Dr Sion explains: "Ours is very different to most others. They push down to a known height and assume the same amount of gas in each tray. Ours comes down and measures the dynamics of the pack and looks for settling time, but can cope with a much wider range of packs and seals. Historically, seal testers haven't been used much because previous designs rejected good packs, but we have now had two very good installations with our new ones." The consequence of not testing for fear of rejecting good product is that leaking trays are not discovered. Dr Sion illustrated this by showing some sealed, vacuum formed trays that he had just purchased from a major chain supermarket, which he said, all had defective seals, making their shelf lives much shorter than they should be. According to Dr Sion, the new Jenton machine can test multiple lanes of products at up to 20 cycles per minute. Sound packs are subsequently converged into a single land for metal detection, check weighing and labeling.