Selecting the appropriate barrier performance for a package is essential to balancing product protection, cost, sustainability, and regulatory requirements. Yet packaging specifications are often based on assumptions, oversimplified rules of thumb, or barrier levels that exceed what the product actually requires. This workshop provides a practical framework for determining the barrier protection that is truly needed.

Participants will learn how to translate product characteristics, deterioration mechanisms, shelf-life objectives, storage conditions, and distribution requirements into a structured packaging requirements profile. The workshop explains the fundamentals of permeation and the practical interpretation of oxygen and water vapor transmission data, highlighting how factors such as package geometry, layer thickness, temperature, humidity, and light influence real-world package performance.

Through worked examples and guided exercises, attendees will evaluate barrier requirements using package dimensions, permeability data, target shelf life, and appropriate safety margins. They will learn how to identify potential overengineering, determine critical assumptions requiring validation, and compare packaging alternatives using a practical decision-making framework.

This workshop is designed for professionals who work with polymeric materials and need a stronger understanding of how plastics respond to temperature, time, frequency, and mechanical loading.

This includes:

• Materials Scientists and Polymer Engineers involved in material characterization, development, and selection.
• R&D and Product Development Professionals who need to evaluate how material properties influence product performance.
• Quality Control and Laboratory Personnel responsible for testing, comparing, and validating polymer materials.
• Process and Manufacturing Engineers who need to understand how material behavior can affect processing and finished-product performance.
• Failure Analysis and Technical Professionals investigating changes in stiffness, damping, transitions, or other mechanical properties.
• Engineers and Technicians new to DMA who want to build a practical foundation in Dynamic Mechanical Analysis and data interpretation.

• Are you unsure what storage modulus, loss modulus, and tan delta actually tell you about a polymer?
• Do you need a better way to understand how plastic materials behave under changing temperatures or mechanical conditions?
• Are you having difficulty interpreting DMA curves and connecting the results to real material behavior?
• Do you need to compare materials for product development, quality control, or material selection?
• Are you trying to identify transitions or changes in polymer behavior that may not be obvious using conventional mechanical testing?
• Do you want to understand both the capabilities and limitations of DMA before using the technique to make engineering decisions?

If these are challenges you encounter, this workshop will provide the theoretical foundation and practical context needed to use DMA more effectively.