FUJIFILM Europe Advanced Functional Materials Division Launches Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 with Focus to Enhance Heat‑Seal Quality in Food and Pharmaceutical Packaging

FUJIFILM Europe Advanced Functional Materials Division has today announced the European availability of Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200, a new pressure measurement film designed specifically for heat sealing and heat pressing processes at temperatures up to 220°C, with a particular focus on demanding food and pharmaceutical packaging applications.

Building on Fujifilm’s global leadership in pressure measurement films, the new Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 enables packaging manufacturers, OEMs, and maintenance teams to measure pressure distribution directly under operating conditions, without cooling equipment, dismantling sealing heads or relying on trial and error settings.

Traditional Prescale™ films have long been used across multiple industries to visualize contact pressure between two surfaces, but they were limited to room temperature use (20°C–35°C) for quantitative measurement. With Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200, Fujifilm extends this capability into the actual temperature ranges used in modern packaging lines:

• Prescale™ for High Temperature 100 series: Recommended operating temperature 35°C–150°C (double sided heating).
• Prescale™ for High Temperature 200 series: Recommended operating temperature 150°C–220°C (double sided heating).

Within these families, users can select different measurable pressure ranges to match their sealing applications, from 0.2 MPa to 10.0 MPa, covering anything from light film seals to high pressure, multilayer, or blister applications.

The film consists of a colour forming layer and a developer layer. When pressure is applied, microcapsules in the colour forming layer break, releasing a colour forming material that reacts with the developer layer to create a red coloration. The colour density correlates with pressure, enabling users to see both pressure distribution and approximate values using colour charts and calibration curves.

By incorporating a heat resistant base material and applying Fujifilm’s proprietary high precision coating and microcapsule design technology, Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 significantly reduces unintended colouring and film deformation at elevated temperatures, ensuring stable and accurate readings up to 220°C.

Heat sealing is a critical step in both flexible food packaging and pharmaceutical blister or sachet production, where seal integrity directly affects product safety, shelf life, and regulatory compliance.

Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 offers packaging stakeholders a series of clear advantages:

• Direct measurement at production temperature
  Manufacturers can insert Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 in place of the packaging web and run their equipment at normal sealing temperatures, eliminating cooling, reheating cycles, and measuring the actual pressure applied by heat seal bars, jaws, or plates. 
• Rapid visual confirmation of seal pressure and balance
  The resulting colour pattern immediately highlights pressure variations across the entire sealing surface, helping to identify issues such as uneven bar alignment, worn components, contamination on the seal face, or insufficient pressure in specific areas. 
• Reduced waste and downtime
  By optimizing settings based on real data, packaging teams can cut back on trial runs, limit film, and product waste, and shorten start up and changeover times.
• Support for regulatory and quality requirements
  The ability to document pressure conditions during validation and routine checks strengthens quality management systems and provides evidence for audits and regulatory inspections in the food and pharmaceutical sectors.

Food packaging manufacturers are under mounting pressure to balance stringent safety regulations with ambitious sustainability goals, often introducing new or more complex material structures that can be more sensitive to sealing conditions. As packaging films evolve, ensuring a consistent, hermetic seal across diverse pack formats becomes increasingly challenging.

Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 provides an effective way to validate and optimize heat seal conditions for:

• Pillow bags and pouches
• Lidding applications
• Multi layer barrier films and recyclable mono material structures

By simulating actual production with Prescale™ inserted in place of the packaging material, operators can visualize whether sufficient and uniform pressure is applied by the heat sealing bars across the whole seal area. This helps prevent issues such as micro leaks, contamination of seal areas, and weak seals that can lead to product spoilage, reduced shelf life, and potential recalls.

The technology also supports process reproducibility across different materials: as businesses test new sustainable structures, they can rapidly confirm suitable sealing parameters, helping to reduce waste and development time.

In the pharmaceutical industry, blister packaging and other heat sealed formats protect medicines from moisture, contamination, and tampering, making seal integrity a critical factor in maintaining drug stability and patient safety. Regulatory expectations around packaging performance and documentation have become more stringent, while new materials and formats add further complexity.

Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200 enables pharmaceutical manufacturers and equipment OEMs to:

• Validate pressure conditions for blister sealing tools by placing the film between forming web and lidding side to verify pressure distribution under production like heat and dwell times.
• Fine tune sealing parameters (pressure, temperature, dwell) to secure robust, uniform sealing across all cavities, helping to minimise the risk of leaks or seal defects.
• Support qualification and re qualification of lines, sealing heads and tooling changes with documented pressure data generated under realistic operating conditions.

By adopting Prescale™ for High Temperature 100/200, pharmaceutical packagers can improve the reliability of their sealing processes, reduce the likelihood of costly and reputationally damaging recalls, and demonstrate robust control to regulators and quality auditors.