In touch with downstream operations

14 October, 2009

In the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the four most fundamental downstream processing operations are filtration, extraction, distillation and crystallisation. Of these, filtration and extraction have demonstrated that they are amenable to machine vision in the Robot Assistant system, manufactured by Cambridge Reactor Design (CRD) using the Intelligent Vision capability available as part of InTouch software.

“Our basic philosophy is to make our clients’ lives as easy as possible by offering a multi-disciplinary skill-set to deliver the solutions they are seeking,” said CRD MD Dr Bashir Harji.

Robot Assistant is a mechanical organic chemistry technician capable of performing a range of repetitive processing operations 24/7. With a load carrying capability of 3kg, it moves repeatedly and reliably to within 0.1mm, recognises motion, takes video images, and does not argue with management personnel!

Machine vision is used in a variety of ways within the system. As well as capturing images of key procedures and generating information on rate of change, the data gathered is used for critical real-time decision making, whereby the next steps in the process are determined via automated feedback loops.

The downstream unit operations that Robot Assistant addresses are rarely investigated as the tests are cumbersome and slow to carry out, and problems with the process may only become apparent on transfer to manufacturing scale. Robot Assistant offers process R&D groups both the capability and the capacity needed to gain full process understanding, to challenge the limitations to the scale-up of downstream processing methods and to design robust industrial processes.

In addition to facilitating continuous process improvements, Robot Assistant provides information that determines the impact of the process on productivity, the environment and waste treatment costs, facilitating the choice of the most cost effective and environmentally friendly option. For example, by investigating a range of solvent options, a product with a suitable boiling point to give a good recovery cycle yield with minimum contamination of water and air can be chosen, thus decreasing environment and waste treatment costs.

Dr Harji said: “CRD has an exclusive agreement to provide a global pharmaceutical company with five robotic platforms worldwide and these are already contributing to drug development.”

InTouch software was chosen for the Robot Assistant because it is easily integrated with all the required input/output hardware, offers a guaranteed method for controlling an articulated robot arm and allows users to interpret their downstream process with any number of graphical representations. For example, variability in temperature, time, mixing, pH control and solvents used in the downstream process can all be displayed visually. The intelligent vision elements are fully incorporated.

The InTouch software is FDA compliant, will recognise information supplied from the Robot Assistant’s log, and is designed to be tamper proof. The log tracks the robot and its movements at any moment in time, giving a secure audit trail.

“A master computer has Wonderware InTouch software installed, while slave computers enable us to control the intelligent vision systems and analytical sample preparation workstations,” said Dr Harji. “The workstations take samples and offer the right level of dilutions so the samples are ready to be analysed by the appropriate analytical system eg. gas chromatography (GC) or high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC).”

He continued: ‘The availability of intelligent icons to reflect the ongoing performance of real time robotic process makes it easy for users to interpret where they are during the course of continual processing.”