An introduction to pharmaceutical machinery
If you’ve found us here, you’re likely finding your footing around the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. Maybe you’re still understanding the pharmaceutical machinery that will help you achieve your business goals. Maybe you’re already ready to select pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers to partner up with. Either way, this comprehensive guide to modern pharma machinery and allied equipment will serve as an indispensable resource when it comes to making informed purchase decisions.
The future of pharma machinery
As with every other industry, the evolution of pharmaceutical machinery is never-ending. From minor advancements to major transformations, change is a constant in pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers’ bid to enhance the speed, efficiency, and safety of production lines. This evolution revolves around customization, digitization, automation, design, and engineering.
Your go-to pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment list
If your pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment list is comprehensive, it’s bound to be a long one. As one of the leading pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers in India, here’s our list of standard pharma equipment that might help you identify and understand any equipment you might have forgotten to add to your own.
– Heat exchangers are essentially energy exchange systems. They are used for both heating and cooling purposes because temperature control is important not only to ensure the integrity of the biochemical processes involved in pharma production, but it is also necessary during cleaning, sterilization and other processes which support manufacturing. Double sheet tubular heat exchangers are ideal for sanitary industries like pharma.
– Cooling towers are the other temperature control mechanism used in pharma industries. They are employed to get rid of excess or unused heat at different stages along the production line, for example, after sterilization, before packaging, or otherwise.
– Mixers are used to mix materials in their powdered, granular, and sometimes liquid form to produce homogenous blends. Agitators, meanwhile, are used to mix liquid materials which need a little extra help to blend together; pharmaceutical agitators promote not only chemical reactions, but also thermal transfers.
– Centrifuges achieve quite the opposite effect as mixers and agitators. Instead of bringing different elements together, they are used to separate mixed components of varying density by utilizing centrifugal forces. In pharma, this is particularly useful to attain reactant purity before biochemical reactions.
– Purified water generation systems, water for injection generation systems, and pure steam generators do as their names suggest. They are systems used to produce pharma grade water or steam which have applications in cleaning, sterilization, as solvents, to produce parenterals, for lyophilization, and humidification.
– Dryers and granulators serve the purpose of drawing water or moisture out of a substance to produce dry solids or powders. This is done in order to make tablets, capsules, extracts, or to minimize the volume and weight of a pharmaceutical substance for ease of transport and storage.
– Pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers in India and elsewhere most commonly produce the most important items on any pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment list:process vessels– both compounding vessels and storage vessels. Specialised compounding or manufacturing vessels are used to produce small volume parenterals and large volume parenterals in controlled environments. They often come with integrated technologies like water for injection (WFI), load sensing, level sensing, CIP/SIP, pH controls, and more. Further, they are resilient to extreme temperature and pressure conditions. Storage or holding vessels are just as important – they hold sterile pharmaceutical preparations or the raw materials that are needed to produce them under positive nitrogen pressure. For ease of use, storage vessels are often also equipped with pumps that help transfer pharma products from holding tanks to filling lines. They also come with similar integrations as compounding vessels.
– Bio kill tank systems are designed to kill pathogens or any other biological organisms present in the wastewater generated during biopharma production. These systems are customizable, offer varying levels of automation, and are available as either single or dual bio kill systems. They are critical not only for you as a pharma producer, but also for the safety of the environment and communities that might be harmed by such waste hazards.
– Most pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers pay more attention to the big fancy pieces of pharmaceutical machinery like process vessels and heat exchangers. But process piping is one those components which plays a crucial role, but the importance of which isn’t stressed enough. TSA is one of the pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers in India that understands the importance of intelligently designed and well-executed process piping. Process piping forms a wide network in your manufacturing facility, connecting pharma machinery and vessels without compromising their quality, purity, safety, or efficiency. High quality process piping can streamline pharma production and make the process of product transfer smooth as butter.
Must-haves: Non-negotiables while choosing pharmaceutical machinery
Modern pharmaceutical machinery is equipped with certain features and integrations which you can’t do without to be competitive in today’s pharma markets.
– Customisation. Your pharma machinery should not just be of good quality, but it should also be perfectly suited to the products and processes specific to your business. A good fit between your requirements and pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers’ offerings is critical. The fanciest machine on the market is of no use to you if pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers can’t customize them to suit your needs.
– Automation. If your systems are not automated in today’s fast paced, constantly evolving industry, you will not be able to compete with pharma manufacturers who use the full benefits of process automation. Automation not only minimises your reliance on manual labour, but it also enhances the repeatability, reliability, and consistency of drug production. By reducing human intervention, it also minimises the risk of errors. Finally, automated systems also have the added benefit of ensuring better compliance to sanitary regulations because in situations in which personnel interact with pharma products, the chances of them shedding contaminants from their skin or clothes only increases. It may not be feasible for you to automate all processes, but ask your pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers to help you with automating as many processes as you can within your budget.
– Ease of cleaning. Integrated CIP and SIP systems are the backbone of cleaning and sterilisation in modern pharma machinery. They are incredibly time-saving, efficient, and prevent the tedium of manually taking apart machinery, cleaning it, and putting it back together. They also maintain the integrity of the cleaning process. This is easily one of the best improvements in pharmaceutical machinery which can cut maintenance downtime and add to your facility’s productive time. Ultimately, you want to rely on a trusted pharmaceutical machinery manufacturer in India so that you don’t have to carry the entire burden of managing all this complex machinery all by yourself. TSA has developed a dedicated community of 300+ happy customers over the past two decades. They speak highly of our willingness to take on any high purity and process challenge and have trusted us time and again to be the pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers of their choice.
