Condition monitoring in the pharmaceutical industry

Dependable running is particularly important for product quality, product compliance and product assurance. Unplanned downtime is costly and disruptive, with potential impacts on product quality assurance and compliance if the manufacturing process is disrupted, so Condition Monitoring is important.

But conventional Condition Monitoring of production equipment can be challenging owing to toxicity and product contamination risks. Safety issues are particularly important – material hazards of flammable / toxic / corrosive nature can make routine walkaround patrols problematic;

And fixed installations of Vibration Monitoring systems can be expensive because of the often wide spread layout of plant leading to high cabling costs. Battery powered Wireless typically has short battery life in the maze of pipework, steelwork and solid walls that are present in many pharmaceutical plant locations

By contrast, the Faraday Predictive system is used or installed entirely in the switchgear location, normally in a clean, dry switchroom, free of chemical, flammable or toxic hazards. So it is safe, and ATEX issues do not need to be considered.

Because the Faraday units are installed in the switchroom, cabling runs from sensor to processor are very short (normally just within the cabinet itself). Communication from the processing unit to the rest of the world is done by ethernet, and many switchrooms already have ethernet network cabling installed already, again keeping the required new cable runs very short.

Location inside switchgear also protects the Faraday Predictive units from external mechanical or environmental damage, in contrast to fixed accelerometers which can be damaged by water, corrosive materials, passing fork lift trucks, or size 12 process operators’ boots.