Camfil

For more than half a century, Camfil has been helping people breathe cleaner air. As a leading manufacturer of premium clean air solutions, we provide commercial and industrial systems for air filtration and air pollution control that improve worker and equipment productivity, minimize energy use and benefit human health and the environment.

We firmly believe that the best solutions for our customers are the best solutions for our planet, too. That’s why every step of the way – from design to delivery and across the product life cycle – we consider the impact of what we do on people and on the world around us. Through a fresh approach to problem-solving, innovative design, precise process control and a strong customer focus we aim to conserve more, use less and find better ways – so we can all breathe easier.

The Camfil Group is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and has 30 manufacturing sites, six R&D centres, local sales offices in 35 countries and 5,600 employees and growing. We proudly serve and support customers in a wide variety of industries and in communities across the world. To discover how Camfil can help you to protect people, processes and the environment.

Understand your process

In many instances, the handling of pharmaceutical ingredients generate harmful dusts during the manufacturing and packaging processes of Oral Solid Dosage (OSD) products. To comply with the industry´s stringent health and safety requirements while meeting mandatory quality requirements a reliable and efficient capture and extraction solution is required. Before considering a dust extraction solution it is important to fully understand the application and processed ingredients.

Application-specific dust extraction solutions

As there is a wide variety in pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging processes, a dust extraction system has to be tailored to the customer´s needs to provide the required safety and filtration efficiency. Especially on processes in the pharma industry, dust extraction solutions have to withstand higher Pmax and Kst values on dusts, as well as a greater number of applications involving hybrid dust and gas mixtures.

Capture Solution:

It is important to extract the dust directly at the source to ensure that it does not escape into the workplace.

Dust Collector Unit:

The dust collector unit is essentially a self-cleaning filter housing with a fan that moves the contaminated air out of the workplace, filters the dust and fume particles and discharges them into a bin or similar receptacle. The choice of filter material is critical and dependent on the dust characteristics and application conditions.

Filtration Rate:

The area of filter material required is also important so that the dust collector is sized appropriately to handle the airflow and dust concentration as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Containment:

Another critical consideration and one which is often overlooked, involves effective containment of potent dusts. Once the airborne dust is captured at source, it needs to be contained at every stage of the extraction process. Containment is also essential during maintenance of the dust collector unit. Especially for potent dusts there should be a specific and integral safe change operation for both the dust discharge system and the filter cartridge change-out. The so called Bag-In/Bag-Out (BIBO) technology is used to prevent operator exposure and the collected material from escaping when performing filter change-outs. The continuous liner technology is used at the discharge system to contain the dust released from the cartridges to the hopper during automatic pulse-cleaning of the system.

Explosion Protection:

If the dust is considered to be combustible or explosive, there are certain values that need to be determined so the correct and ATEX-certified explosion protection. The goal of the system is to control an explosion to keep employees safe and minimize plant and equipment damage.

• Passive Systems: This systems utilise passive components such as vent panels and mechanical flat valves. Passive systems are very reliable but also have limitations in there usage.
• Active Systems: Active systems involve much more costly technology but allow a greater flexibility in installation.

Energy Consumption:

Today energy consumption has become increasingly important and selecting an energy efficient solution is vital. In this, the design of the extraction system, the pressure drop of the dust collector and the efficiency of the fan combined with accurate control must be reviewed. If you analyse the cost of operating a system, the energy for the fan comes out as the main cost, so selecting a lower filter load and consequently considerably lower pressure drop is a profitable and a good choice in this age.