Sunday 22 May 2011

Pharmaceutical Fermenter Equipment Modules

I have recently been looking at ControlDraw models for  large scale Pharmaceutical Fermenter Units from 4 different companies. Process wise, all the fermenters are broadly similar, but each client has their own way!
I cannot publish them because because they are confidential, agreements signed!
However I have summarised them using some statistics from the models. 


Some differences are immediately apparent.
Why is the IO Count for Client 3 so low? This is because they do not use limit switches on their valves. This is something I have never understood as it seems to me that any cost savings would be obliterated by the downtime cause by the inablity to quickly diagnose valve failures.
Why do  Clients 1 and 3 have so many parameters? I think that this is in part because they do not distinguish between critical parameters (that can be changed to define the product or CIP ) and other parameters

Actually the differences are greater than they appear, mostly because of different ways of handling routing and cleaning.
What they all have in common is Equipement modules for:

Agitator Control
CIP / SIP
Dissolved Oxygen Control
Exhaust Filter
Gas Feed
Inoculation Transfer
Media Supply
pH Control
Pressure Control
Product Transfer
Sampling
Temperature Control
Some of the models are Unit Centric (the EM's are driven to states by a Unit Level phase) and some are EM Centric where the EM's run phases in parallel with each other. The former approach is my preference as it results in less complexity