Sealer Sales recently made a donation of hand impulse sealers (FS-200s and FSC-220) and stand up pouches to the Industrial Engineering department at San Jose State University to assist with their annual class project.

Every spring undergraduate students take Industrial and Systems Engineering 120, a work measurement/work design class where they repeatedly design, test, build and then use a work station for making trail mix for on-campus food pantries.

In ISE 120, the students analyze every hand movement redesigning to increase safety while decreasing cycle time.

Each year, the class distributes over 1,200 bags of trail mix (500+lbs) to the 11 on-campus food pantries. Read more about the trail mix project here.

The students provided us with a summary of best practices which we found useful to share here:

The sealer was simple and practical to use. Our group had no prior experience in using a sealer, but we managed to utilize it effectively. It was easy to use and safe.
We recommend our hand impulse sealers to nearly anyone starting out a project where they need to seal plastic bags. As the San Jose State University students have summarized, the sealer is simple and easy to use.
The best practice the participants learned in using the impulse sealers were to always keep an eye on the light and to ensure to count to four seconds after the light turned green. Congealing is the process of allowing the seal to cool under pressure. This allows the seal to set and cool providing the best quality seal. Read more here.
Using a higher setting than normal for the small sandwich bags for food donations.
Different materials will require different timer settings. Previously, the students were packaging their trail mix in sandwich bags which is a much thinner bag compared to our stand up pouches (4mil). Adjusting for different materials is important when using a hand impulse sealer. We always recommend using the lowest timer setting that will seal your material.
An important aspect of using the impulse sealers was to be patient and let the device do its job. Making sure to properly seal the bag involved a bit of practice trials, but once the team was comfortable using the machine it worked very well. Ensuring we had a proper seal was vital for this experiment because the project involved sealing food and without a device like the impulse sealer the product wouldn't be airtight and ready for distribution.

Sealer Sales is committed to serving educational and charitable organizations and we are very excited to be able to assist with this project. To see more photos from this project, click here.

Sealer Sales Gives Back