Alan Messenger, sales director at Optimal Industrial Automation, looks at how manufacturers and processors can advance their fluidised bed dryers to enhance competitiveness and profitability.
Optimal Industrial Automation
Offering a highly efficient drying method, FBDs play a fundamental role in various manufacturing industries, including pharmaceutical, chemical, and food & beverage. These machines can deliver high drying rates and short cycle times, ultimately helping companies maximise throughput. Also, thanks to their thermodynamic efficiency and ability to uniformly reduce moisture and minimise the potential for mechanical damage to materials, they can drive quality-centric operations.
In addition, FBDs help the formation of strong bonds for the agglomeration of powder formulations and make it possible to obtain perfectly compressed products, such as tablets and caplets. As a result, these units are extremely popular when handling powders or granules, such as granulation operations for oral solid dosage (OSD) pharmaceutical production.
Moreover, they have a direct impact on the characteristics of a product, such as shelf life and quality. By reducing water content in end products, the rate of both biological contamination and undesirable reactions are slowed, improving storability and transportability.
It’s all about control
Beyond the key role of FBDs in effective drying operations, industry players also profit from the long service life of these machines, which can exceed 35 years. Due to the absence of moving parts, they require limited maintenance, lowering operational expenses and downtime.
The robust nature of these units, however, doesn’t mean that the system cannot benefit from upgrades. In fact, as the market places ever more demanding requirements on producers, continuously advancing manufacturing operations is a must to remain competitive. Typically, regular updates to control systems enhance time-, cost-, and energy-efficiency, while outdated setups may lead to under- or over-drying, affecting product quality and value.
The recent quantum leap in control technologies and digital solutions has unleashed a number of new, highly advantageous opportunities for FBD-based processes in a very short time. By adopting smarter control systems that communicate with key sensors and analysers as well as monitoring and visualisation platforms, it is possible to develop a greater understanding of FBD units, their components, processes, feedstocks and products.
Users can leverage these insights to better manage their activities, from equipment maintenance to fluidisation and drying conditions. The response can be manual or automated, with FDBs accurately and precisely self-regulating their operations to improve efficiency, product quality and resource utilisation. Ultimately, within fully automated setups, FBD control can enable the development of interconnected, smart manufacturing frameworks that futureproof production operations.
Perhaps more importantly for companies in highly regulated sectors, the use of advanced control systems can help store valuable process information as well as produce documentation for quality audits, supporting regulatory compliance and current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP).
Advancing FBD control through collaborations
The upgrade of control systems for FBDs should be customised to the specific application while also taking a number of factors, such as compatibility with existing components as well as safety and regulatory compliance, into consideration. Therefore, it is advisable for end users to collaborate with a knowledgeable industrial automation specialist and system integrator who can provide key support in identifying and implementing the most effective improvement strategies for the intended control system.
A full-service provider, such as Optimal, should be preferred, as it can streamline the entire project as well as provide assistance at any stage while enabling continuous improvements. Furthermore, such a partner can help reverse engineer existing setups or handle situations when supporting documentation may be limited, ensuring that the new setup can run smoothly.
With nearly 40 years of experience in industrial automation and control technology applications in the chemical and (bio)pharmaceutical sector, Optimal has a long track record of supporting the successful upgrade of FBDs. These have enabled end users to advance their operations and drive their competitiveness in increasingly demanding markets.