Rice cereal is usually used as a supplementary food of breast milk or other infant formula food, which provides necessary nutrition to the babies. Rice cereal is mainly made of millet or rice, formulated with sugar, vegetables, fruit, egg and meat, etc. which contain rich amount of minerals including calcium, phosphorus, iron, zinc and vitamin.

Since there are a large amount of protein, minerals and vitamins contained in rice cereal, it is liable to be oxidized by the oxygen that enters into the package. The most commonly used package for rice cereal is paper-aluminum-plastic cans. In order to guarantee the quality of rice cereal within its shelf life, the packaging materials should have sufficient oxygen barrier property.

This article provides a simplified test method of oxygen barrier property of paper-aluminum-plastic cans for your reference which may be helpful to the manufacturers of rice cereal when selecting packaging materials for their products. The testing instrument we used for the tests is Labthink’s OX2/230 Oxygen Transmission Rate Test System.

Figure 1. Infant Rice Cereal Package

Figure 2. OX2/230 Oxygen Transmission Rate Test System

This instrument uses a coulometric detector to determine the oxygen transmission rate. The specimen is mounted as a sealed semi-barrier between two chambers at ambient atmospheric pressure. One chamber is slowly purged by a stream of nitrogen at a given temperature and relative humidity and the other chamber is purged by a stream of oxygen at the same temperature as the nitrogen stream but may have a different relative humidity than the nitrogen stream. In this case the environment would more closely simulate actual shelf conditions. As oxygen gas permeates through the film into the nitrogen carrier gas, it is transported to the coulometric detector where it produces an electrical current, the magnitude of which is proportional to the amount of oxygen flowing into the detector per unit time. Note: For the package specimens, nitrogen flows inside the package while oxygen flow outside the package.

The tests shall be performed according to the following procedures.

(1)   Fix one specimen in the special sample fixture and then fix the specimen on a test support for package test. Seal the specimen and connect it to the instrument with pipes. Then cover the specimen and test support with a sealing bag.

(2)   Set specimen name, test temperature, test humidity and other test parameters.

(3)   Click Start Test to start the test.

(4)   Turn on the gas supply. Adjust the humidity and carrier gas flow rate.

(5)   When the test is finished, the test results will be calculated and displayed automatically.

For more details about OX2/230 Oxygen Transmission Rate Test System, please visit www.labthink.com

About Labthink Instruments Co., Ltd:

Labthink Instruments Co., Ltd is one leading supplier of packaging testing instruments, which is headquartered in Jinan, China and operated in Boston, U.S.A.