Alfa Laval highlights its growing biopharma presence

Published: 26-May-2009

Two new pumps have been added to the Alfa Laval range for the biopharm industry, supported by the Alfa Laval Q-doc documentation package.

Two new pumps have been added to the Alfa Laval range for the biopharm industry, supported by the Alfa Laval Q-doc documentation package.

The SolidC UltraPure is a standardised centrifugal pump design that is said to be ideal for use in Cleaning In Place (CIP) and intermittent product pumping. The design avoids any crevices in which contamination might accumulate or bacterial growth can build up, making the SolidC UltraPure quick and easy to clean, saving on both cleaning agents and consumption of highpurity water.

The steam sterilisable MR UltraPure range features liquid ring technology and is ideal for pumping mixtures of liquid and gas. These units are normally specified for use as CIP return pumps because they help prevent any build-up of fluids in product tanks during the CIP cycle, thereby ensuring effective cleaning of these tanks.

The two newly launched pumps are both accompanied by Alfa Laval Q-doc product documentation, which provides biopharm companies with full transparency regarding sourcing, production and supply chains, and makes it easy to trace even slight change in materials or manufacturing procedures.

Q-doc is based upon Good Documentation Practice (GDP) and comprises equipment manuals, factory acceptance and performance tests, quality and manufacturing procedures, relevant material certificates and all necessary parts and service information.

The company has also launched three new hygienic heat exchangers for the pharma industry: Pharma-line, Pharma-X and Compabloc.

Pharma-line is a double tube shell heat exchanger especially designed to work in the most stringent hygienic conditions in applications such as Water-For-Injection (WFI), Purified Water (PW), and heating/cooling of pharmaceutical products.

Pharma-line can be installed horizontally or vertically, depending on the duty or space. For easy installation, lifting and mounting devices are welded to the unit. Thermal fatigue caused by large temperature changes is managed by a U-bend in two-pass units, and by a welded-in bellow in straight units.

The Pharma-X tube-in-tube heat exchanger was specially developed to meet the need for an efficient sanitary heat exchanger for point-of-use cooling of WFI with no risk of contamination between the product and the cooling medium.

For quick and easy installation, the Pharma-X point-of-use cooler is supplied as a complete insulated module with a pitot tube arrangement and either manual or automatic valves. The design of the heat exchanger, with welds toward the outside only, completely eliminates the possibility of cross contamination. Another advantage is that there are no dead legs.

With the Pharma-X heat exchanger, heat transfer is very efficient due to counter-current flow and high turbulence. This allows for a low hold-up volume and very low cooling water demands. The heat exchanger is virtually maintenance-free with no gaskets to replace, saving valuable system downtime.

Compabloc is an all-welded plate heat condenser that operates as an extremely efficient condenser on reactors and vent condensers. Instead of utilising bulky conventional heat exchangers, i.e. shell-and-tubes and graphite blocks, Compabloc is based on a compact block of heat transfer plates that generate an overall heat transfer coefficient several times greater than corresponding shell-and-tube units.

The Compabloc can be designed in a variety of materials and is built around a pack of corrugated heat transfer plates, welded alternately to form channels. It requires only 25-30% of the heat transfer area of an equivalent tubular unit. The Compabloc is fully accessible, and is also available in a hygienic version, which is fully drainable with a low surface roughness.

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