The quality of packaging materials used in the food and beverage industry must be controlled regularly in order to avoid negative effects on packaged products caused by emissions, e.g. VOC emissions from printing processes or from varnishes used on inner surfaces of the packaging material. Many companies have worldwide production sites, that may not all have their own quality control laboratories. Therefore VOC emissions can not necessarily be measured at-line and production process development is often halted due to the lack of analytical data. A headspace sampler is presented that can be combined either with a classic GC detector like an FID for quickly measuring thresholds as summed parameters to release a batch of a product or with metal oxide sensors, e.g. to monitor production processes atline. A major benefit of metal oxide sensors is that they operate without combustion gases, enabling their use on production sites. Furthermore, the presented headspace sampler can be equipped with a transfer line to couple it e.g. to GC/MS for further investigations in the laboratory.
The headspace sampler design enables direct sampling from closed food and beverage packaging. The system contains no 6-port valve and is therefore highly robust and well suited for regular transportation. An application is presented using all available configurations of the system for the determination of VOC-emissions from the inner varnish of beverage cans. The beverage cans are taken straight from the production line without any treatment or modification. The system is calibrated using ethanol, determination of response factors for all relevant compounds against the ethanol calibration therefore have to be known in order to determine the VOC emissions.
