Measuring solvent vapour permeability

18th May 2016

Peter Smith

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Water and other vapours can permeate through the actual fabric of adhesives or mastics, sometimes in large volume. This can cause a huge variety of adhesion problems, including failure – water and its vapour are now thought to be the world’s most damaging contaminant.

Although many materials are an effective barrier against liquid, when it comes to vapour they can be very poor barriers indeed. Cellulose, EVOH or PVOH for example, offer virtually no barrier to water vapour.

Versaperm’s range of solvent vapour permeability measurement equipment is designed to overcome these problems for both the development and QC of adhesives and mastics. It gives you the ability to test and develop materials and determine the effect of both the manufacturing techniques and the exact combination of ingredients used. The equipment is fast and accurate and offers a simple way to measure solvent vapour permeability, not just for water vapour but also for hydrocarbon vapour and most other gasses including hydrogen, oxygen, solvents and CO2.

Measurements are accurate in the parts per million range for most adhesives and mastics and you can characterize several separate adhesives or mastic samples at the same time, sometimes in as little as 30 minutes. Conventional gravimetric measurements take several days, weeks or months and are significantly less accurate.

As well as manufacturing the instruments, Versaperm offers a permeability laboratory service for companies that need to test samples on an irregular basis.