The tolerance for pharmaceutical and bioprocess manufacturing variations is relatively small to meet the quality requirements of finished medicines and therapeutics. In a Process Instrumentation article, How to ensure reliable pressure transmitter measurement in pharmaceutical applications, Emerson’s Brandon Haschke shares how “Advanced hygienic pressure transmitters can reduce downtime and operating costs thanks to long-term stability that requires fewer calibrations.”
Brandon opens by explaining how:
…pressure measurement is critical to sterile and precise batch processes of material such as vaccines, commodity chemicals or specialized cellular tissue. Pressure transmitters perform the essential function of tracking the pressure within these closed process systems. Any errors or deviations from the set standard might mean a batch must be discarded because it more than likely will not meet stringent government regulations.
Cleaning operations between batches:
…exposes the transmitter to high pressure and temperatures that can lead to errors in the transmitter data. If transmitter drift is significant enough, which it is likely to be, it will cause batch inconsistencies.
To address this challenge, a:
…new device was recently introduced to the market, an advanced hygienic pressure measurement device, which can withstand many clean-in-place (CIP) and sterilization-in-place (SIP) cycles. The device — the Rosemount 3051HT Hygienic Pressure Transmitter [hyperlink added] — dramatically reduces transmitter drift and provides long-term stability to pressure measurement performance.
Robust and reliable pressure measurement is critical to these processes.
To ensure the success of batch processes, hygienic pressure transmitters are used in a range of reactor types, such as fed-batch or continuous-perfusion bioreactors, to continuously monitor the batch pressure. Proper batch pressure must be maintained to avoid potentially dangerous conditions from arising, such as tanks overflowing or becoming over-pressured, which causes safety concerns. When chemical reactions do not occur in optimal conditions, it can cause the bioprocess to underperform or fail altogether, which can lead to lower product quality or a total scrapping of a batch as useless.
Read the article for more on how these hygienic pressure transmitters help avoid heat damage during cleaning cycles, help safely meet batch-to-batch repeatability, and support the industry standards for hygienic engineering and design and bioprocessing equipment.
Visit the Rosemount 3051 Pressure Transmitter Family section on Emerson.com for more on the hygienic and complete line of pressure transmitters to address your most challenging applications.