Since it was introduced in the 19th century, food packaging has made great advances focused on improving food protection and quality, health and safety, providing longer shelf life and adhering to more demanding environmental and international standards. To address these requirements, a wide range of new materials and improved processing techniques have been developed to generate sophisticated, thin, multilayer food packaging. Multilayer food packaging has routinely been characterized using FT-IR spectroscopy, however, the need to chemically characterize the larger number of increasingly thin layers in the multilayer packaging films being developed and manufactured today often exceeds the spatial resolution limits of convention al FT-IR microspectroscopy. The Mirage IR microscope using photothermal IR spectroscopy (PTIR), provides a new level of capability to provide submicron IR characterization of thin multilayer film while eliminating or significantly reducing sample preparation and improving data turnaround times.
