Many pharmaceutical manufacturers are using new smart condition monitoring in pharma to boost productivity. Consequently, the improved monitoring helps reduce downtime as they move from batch production to continuous operation to improve OEE.

Pharma is a highly regulated sector with huge financial incentives to keep production lines running. Importantly, pharmaceutical manufacturers loses fewer hours of unscheduled downtime than the automotive industry, or the food and beverage sector.

Firstly, pharmaceutical manufacturers are aware that they need to increase machine availability and reduce unscheduled downtime to respond to global competition. They are finding traditional techniques of managing maintenance by predicting downtime have been expensive. Often, it meant relying on out-sourced experts to analyse machinery and interpret the results of complex algorithms. The alternative is highly subjective, relying on the experience of in-house engineers who are intimate with production lines.

In-line quality control

Moving to continuous production also creates an environment where production systems are less tolerant of breakdowns or equipment variability. Traditionally, drug manufacturing takes place in stages, enabling tests made at each stage to confirm the requisite quality. However, current test regulations now allow in-line quality control testing during a continuous production process. This means when the production process don’t stop, reliability must be 100%.

Condition monitoring technologies offer further opportunities for preventative maintenance. They identify devices nearing the end or their working life to ensure replacement before unscheduled downtime. In this way, smart condition monitoring adds predictive maintenance to the users’ preventative maintenance programmes.

Smart Condition Monitoring in pharma

The Smart Condition Monitoring in pharma (SCM) is a solution from Mitsubishi Electric is an integrated approach to monitoring the condition of individual assets. It provides holistic monitoring for the asset health of the whole plant. The resilt is the SCM systems to operate continuously to give a simple but effective warning prior to significant failure.

Smart condition monitoring supports a range of predictive maintenance functions. These include: bearing defect detection; imbalance detection; misalignment; temperature measurement; cavitation detection; phase failure, and many more. Notably, by linking multiple sensors into the control system enables the controller to analyse patterns of operation that are outside normal parameters. As a result, the condition monitoring system that can then trigger a series of alarm conditions as needed.

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