Measurement of Oxygen transmission rate through foamed materials for bottle closures

The determination of the oxygen transmission rate (OTR) through closures in glass bottles is becoming increasingly important for quality control of different batches and for development purposes. The Mocon method for measuring OTR is globally accepted and used in different applications. However, one of the major drawbacks this method presents when applied to bottle/closures systems is the long time required to obtain stable measurements when 40 mm long closures are tested. This paper describes a method to obtain OTR values with samples of reduced thickness with much shorter measurements time, since the condition of steady state during measurements is achieved faster and compares the estimated full-length commercial closure OTR with experimental values.