Hard cold in pharmaceutical production, requiring very low temperatures pushed to near-cryogenic range. A special solution in this field was developed by Tempco to meet the needs of a customer for the production of an innovative aerosol. The application involved a spray drying step for the production of the aerosol, a process which is commonly employed to produce APIs and other pharmaceutical ingredients by investing with a warm air flow the vaporized droplets of a liquid formulation.
Being aimed to dry the atomized liquid stream of the formulation, the air flow employed must have the lowest level of humidity possible. Therefore, the chiller here provides dehumidification of the air flow by cooling it, ensuring that during the spray drying process it doesn’t bring any further humidity instead of removing it.
After an accurate study of both the application and the characteristics of the production process, Tempco envisioned two different options, consisting in a cooling system using liquid nitrogen or a classic compressor chiller solution.
“Together with the customer, we decided that the classic solution employing compressor chillers was the best choice – says Valter Biolchi, CEO and founder of Tempco -, due to its technical advantages and an easier maintenance and management, compared to the one using liquid nitrogen. I addition, in order to ensure the extreme reliability and availability of the cooling system, we agreed for the supply of two chillers working in parallel, each one able to achieve a 75% thermal capacity share of the overall thermal duty”.
The two chillers supplied for this pharmaceutical industry application are air condensed and offer a cooling power down to -30° C. The solution is integrated with an automatic regulation system of the condensation, which guarantees to obtain the maximum efficiency in every season of the year, a key requirement due to the fact that the plant is at work during the whole year.
The execution in full stainless steel of the cooling system has a special insulation, expressly intended for extreme low temperatures. A storage and distributing skid was built inside the customer’s building, providing the reactor the non-freezing solution, and equipped with:
- Storage tanks
- Redundant pumps
- Monitoring and management centralized system
The remote management from a room-control allows control and piloting of both chillers and pumps, with the possibility to manage alarms in order to ensure maximum productivity and to avoid expensive downtimes.
For more information about Tempco, visit our company profile.