Mobile Granulation Skid for the Life Sciences Industry

Hygienic Design for the De-Agglomeration of Pharmaceutical Ingredients

Processed materials: Salt for culture media

The Industrial objective: Our client, located in Miami, FL, is an American supplier of scientific instrumentation, reagents and consumables, and software services.

The client’s facility would receive raw materials, such as salts, in 55-gallon drums that needed to be unloaded and delumped from prolonged storage. The powder agglomeration would cause issues with their mixing and blending process, causing inconsistencies in their blended formulas for cell culture dishes. Our powder handling experts were given the task of designing a solution that would allow operators to manually fill a small powder hopper that would feed into a lump breaking device and discharge into a collection pot below. The design needed to be mobile, easy to clean and free from animal by-products.

The Process Solution: Palamatic presented a powder processing equipment station that would allow an operator to manually unload the salt powder into a small collection hopper and use gravity to feed into a granulating device. A discharge hopper, with torque clamp, would firmly seal an inner liner that was placed inside a secondary collection drum below the station. The entire assembly was under 6 feet in height and installed on caster wheels for movement around the production floor. Easy to clean features were taking into consideration to meet strict hygienic requirements.

The Industrial Equipment: Granulator GR-ECD

The assembly was designed to meet productions standards on a whenever and wherever, as needed basis. Therefore, this powder handling system was designed to meet 4 main objectives:

1. Powder Deagglomeration
2. Compact design
3. Hygienic and easy to clean
4. Mobility

At the core of this industrial lump crushing skid is the Granulator GR-ECD. Designed by our engineering office at Palamatic Process, the ECD model of Granulators is designed for the food industry and pharmaceutical industry, but has applications for wherever bulk material manufacturing processes have strict and demanding equipment cleaning requirements.

What is a Granulator?

Granulators (also known as Kibblers, Pre-Breakers, Lump crushers, industrial crushers) are a hybrid lump breaking machine and powder classifier in one unit. These bulk material processing units consist of a cantilevered drive shaft connected to a gearbox motor. Attached to the drive shaft are large rotating scraper blades with a U-shaped trough-style perforated screen tray underneath. The screen provides the necessary powder particle size classification. Furthermore, it and can slide in and out of the unit for fast and easy screen changes as well as to help facilitate COP (clean out of place) procedures. As the scraper blades spin, the bulk mass of the powder is forced through the perforated screen for both deagglomeration effects and particle-sizing to meet a specific mesh size criterion (>D100).

These lump breakers are known for their robust construction, offering low RPMs with high torque to crush the toughest of powder agglomerates. The ECD version (easy clean design) further integrates guide rails on the drive assembly end, which allows one operator to pull the entire assembly a part without risk of lifting heavy loads. This helps facilitate rapid wash down procedures between production runs. Powder granulator machines work best when they are under a constant headload. The reason being that the weight of the bulk material helps apply pressure on the powder lumps against the rotating scraper blades and then through the screen. The ultimate goal of a granulator is to help facilitate material flow characteristics for the purpose of powder blending and pneumatic conveying operations.

Further design elements include a small 30-liter powder collection hopper to funnel the material into the granulator and a quick connect clamp style collection pot underneath. The operators would use a pneumatic drum lifting station to lift, tilt and empty the 55-gallon drum of powder into the industrial buffer hopper. The hopper would discharge directly into the inlet of the deagglomerator and then into the powder collection bucket underneath. The particle calibration grid used was a 5-mesh screen size. A safety interlock sensor is installed on the lid of the collection hopper to prevent the machine from running during loading operations. No bolted flanges were used in the assembly, all connection points were attached using toggle clamps. This further re-enforced the idea of easy and rapid disassembly and reassembly for hygiene and cleaning procedures. A manual butterfly valve was installed out the bottom of the powder discharge hopper to provide isolation and prevent any material spills. The entire assembly was fabricated from 316 stainless steel.

The installation was supplied with a control box mounted directly to the skid support frame. The operator would only then need a power source via cord extension connection for plug and play function. The control cabinet served basic purposes of start/stop and E-stop parameters, as well as safety switch control and power management.

Palamatic Process has been supplying the powder and bulk solids industry with lump crushing and powder milling equipment since 1992. In order to determine what solution is best for your project, contact one of our sales engineers. Together, our team of experts can provide the right kind of powder filling equipment that will meet your production goals. Contact one of our experts today for assistance with needed material handling solutions and to request a quote.