Ethylene permeance through perforated packaging film: Modelling and effect of air velocity, temperature, film thickness and perforation diameter

Abstract

Perforation in packaging material is one of the efficient ways to remove ethylene from fresh produce packages for delaying the ripening of climacteric fruit and vegetables. The effect of storage conditions on ethylene permeance has not been studied previously, therefore, this study pursued to investigate and model the effect of cooling air velocity, temperature and perforation size on the ethylene permeance through oriented polypropylene packaging film. Ethylene permeance was estimated from 1.70 ± 0.02 to 4.06 ± 0.03 cm s−1 at different temperatures, air velocities and perforation sizes. The perforation diameter showed an inverse significant impact on ethylene permeance. The model based on the empirical approach and artificial neural network using validation data exhibited an R2 of 0.9515 and 0.9890, respectively. The presented study would be helpful in optimising the perforation size in order to avoid ethylene accumulation inside fruit packages, under different storage conditions.