Help for vaccine production: Digitized compressor technology

Rolf Hömke, research spokesman for the Ger­man Asso­ci­a­tion of Research-Based Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Com­pa­nies (VFA), made clear what came as no sur­prise to those respon­si­ble for vac­cine production:

“It’s one thing to pro­duce on a small scale, it’s anoth­er thing when they have to scale up all at once.”

Increas­ing vac­cine vol­umes on a scale nev­er before prac­ticed to con­tain and end the pan­dem­ic is imper­a­tive. As a result, expan­sions and con­ver­sions of exist­ing pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties are caus­ing sup­ply bot­tle­necks. On the pos­i­tive side, the nec­es­sary mature tech­nolo­gies for expand­ing capac­i­ties are avail­able. One exam­ple of this is the com­po­nents for gen­er­at­ing and treat­ing high-puri­ty com­pressed air, which is indis­pens­able as process and work­ing air. The use of oil-free com­pres­sors is advan­ta­geous here.  Down­stream treat­ment is then less costly.

And because the pro­duc­tion of large quan­ti­ties of vac­cine also requires large quan­ti­ties of addi­tion­al com­pressed air, exist­ing com­pressed air sta­tions have to be upgrad­ed. A new oil-free Plug & Work com­pres­sor came in handy for the com­pa­nies in this sit­u­a­tion. Its dig­i­tized dri­ve pre­cise­ly deliv­ers the required vol­ume flow at the spec­i­fied pres­sure lev­el. As com­pressed air demand grows, this com­pres­sor can be “upgrad­ed” to the desired capac­i­ty with­in the avail­able rat­ed capac­i­ty range of 75 kW to 160 kW.

This is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more eco­nom­i­cal than invest­ing in a new larg­er or addi­tion­al com­pres­sor. It also elim­i­nates down­time, deliv­ery times and instal­la­tion costs, as well as addi­tion­al space require­ments. In the cur­rent cli­mate, where phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies are work­ing to build up pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty for vac­cine pro­duc­tion, this is a key argu­ment for using Com­pAir’s new Ulti­ma com­pres­sors, which are already in use at many phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal pro­duc­tion sites around the world.

The eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of exten­sive plug & work instal­la­tion of these com­pact machines, which do not require com­plex air duct instal­la­tions, are con­sid­er­able. For exam­ple, approx­i­mate­ly 37% of floor space is saved com­pared to con­ven­tion­al oil-free com­pres­sors. The retro­fitting and con­ver­sion of com­pressed air sta­tions, even under lim­it­ed space con­di­tions, can be eas­i­ly real­ized. Added to this is the advan­tage of a sound pres­sure lev­el of only 69 db(A). — This is anoth­er result of the com­pact gear­less design, which is achieved by dig­i­tiz­ing the drive.

Sustainability: Digitization and waste heat recovery

 The low-pres­sure and high-pres­sure stages of the Ulti­ma com­pres­sor are each dri­ven by their own fre­quen­cy-con­trolled high-speed per­ma­nent mag­net motor. Syn­chro­niza­tion is han­dled by the elec­tron­ics of the fre­quen­cy con­vert­er. This dig­i­tal gear­box replaces the oth­er­wise com­mon mechan­i­cal gear­box, which loads the com­pres­sor sys­tems with both ener­gy and lubricants.

The result is an oil-free com­pres­sor with a high­er pow­er den­si­ty, small­er instal­la­tion space and less weight. The con­sis­tent­ly max­i­mum effi­cien­cy that can be achieved in this way leads to a reduc­tion in ener­gy costs of up to 13 per­cent. The prob­lem of unused ener­gy dur­ing idling of speed-con­trolled com­pres­sors has also been reduced. This dig­i­tized air com­pres­sor con­sumes up to 45 per­cent less pow­er at idle than con­ven­tion­al two-stage compressors.

The patent­ed closed cool­ing sys­tem of the com­pres­sor makes it pos­si­ble to use the waste heat gen­er­at­ed dur­ing com­pres­sion to pro­duce process hot water at usable tem­per­a­tures of up to 85°C, and for the first time not only in water-cooled mod­els but also in air-cooled models.

This pays off in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try, which has a high process heat demand for its numer­ous pro­duc­tion process­es. If adsorp­tion dry­ers are used to achieve an opti­mum pres­sure dew point for the com­pressed air, part of the waste heat can also be used to regen­er­ate the desiccant.

Con­clu­sion: the road to mass pro­duc­tion of vac­cines to con­tain and end the pan­dem­ic must over­come many bot­tle­necks. A new dig­i­tal oil-free com­pres­sor tech­nol­o­gy is help­ing to make retro­fitting exist­ing com­pressed air sup­ply sys­tems in vac­cine pro­duc­tion faster, more eco­nom­i­cal and more sustainable.