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Meter can help prevent water vapour damage

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Feb 7, 2006

Water vapour meter has automated computer control that can cope with several samples at a time, and still give a reading in 30min for some materials.

Versaperm is launching an instrument for the fast and accurate measurement of water vapour permeability.

The damage and waste caused by water vapour costs UK industry hundreds of millions of pounds a year, but it can now be checked with a 30min measurement.

Seals failing, electronics failing, components rusting, machinery jamming and pipes clogging are all caused by a misunderstanding about water vapour that is easy to put right.

Water vapour is omnipresent and highly invasive but products and packaging with inappropriate vapour permeabilities needlessly reduce the active life and effectiveness of a huge range of products.

The Versaperm WVTR (water vapour transmission) Mk VI meter has automated computer control that can cope with several samples at a time, and still give a reading in 30min for some materials.

The conventionally gravimetric measurement technique takes several days and gives less accurate and reproducible results.

The Mk VI needs little re-calibration and requires a small amount of training to give results that can be accurate to better than one part per million (with some samples a few parts per hundred million).

Sensitivities are typically in the range 0.05 to 3200g/m2/day.

Options include single and multi-sample systems, plus a range of measurement chambers and sensors that can be supplied for testing samples from the size of a thimble up to a pallet load and beyond.

The equipment can also measure the equilibrium relative humidity of substances that might otherwise be decomposed by normal water content measuring techniques.

And it can be configured to measure the diffusion rates of most gaseous elements (water, O2, CO2 and so on).

The company operates a laboratory service to measure permeability for companies where the volume or logistics of measurements does not demand a dedicated instrument.