Cleaning/Hygiene Concept
Simple chemical standard or hygiene-compliant design:
Your cleaning requirements determine the system design.
The interaction of cleaning concept and hygiene components to ensure product purity.
It depends on the end products whether the fluid bed or spouted bed production plant has to be designed to simple chemical standards inside and out or to conform to hygiene standards. A thoroughly thought-out plant concept helps to protect the investment budget. With a design for simple cleaning, as well as an intelligent room and zone concept for wet cleaning and the dry storage of filter elements, product purity can be ensured in production to the chemical standard in exactly the same way as in a 100% hygienic design – but the costs are lower.
As a plant manufacturer with many years of experience, Glatt is aware of factors such as time, temperature, mechanics and concentration of the cleaning media and is therefore able to meet special hygiene and cleaning requirements.
The cleaning concept is an essential part of the plant design right from the start, and our expertise is incorporated into the planning and construction of your production plant. Based on customer knowledge of the cleanability of raw materials and products and the risks of cross-contamination, we propose customer-specific solutions. The procedure is then determined by the four factors of time, temperature, mechanics and concentration, which is related to cleaning media such as water, steam, alkalis, acids or industrial cleaners.
For mono-product plants with no particular hazard potential, dry plant cleaning or wet cleaning by hand may be sufficient. Frequent product changes increase the cleaning effort. In the case of frequently changing products or substances with a hazard potential, automated inline wet cleaning in a closed process (Washing in Place, WIP) is therefore advisable. Glatt offers complex Washing in Place (WIP) systems. The Glatt Group has many years of experience in this field, which extends to validatable Cleaning in Place (CIP) systems.
Glatt attaches great importance to easy cleanability of all plants. Easy access to all plant components is just as much a part of this as tried-and-tested cleaning openings and water drains as well as the installation of cleaning nozzles.
Many constructional details have to be considered in order to realize an automated cleaning of the plant, such as:
- high surface quality of the parts in contact with the product
- easily demountable spray nozzles
- correct arrangement of the cleaning nozzles
- special flange connections
- special measuring transducers
- optimal drainage of the cleaning water
Accessible filter chamber
The cartridge filters are removed for cleaning. Subsequently, an integrated washing nozzle system ensures safe cleaning of the plant.
Our WIP/CIP cleaning systems supply your process equipment with all the necessary cleaning media with unlimited flexibility.
Glatt also supplies cleaning systems to match the cleaning concept. Anything is possible – from standard designs to customized solutions. For batch plants in particular, Glatt offers ready-made solutions for individual cleaning modules through to central cleaning stations for several plants. You can choose between semi-automatic WIP cleaning or fully automatic CIP cleaning, which dispenses with any manual cleaning steps.
Our diverse cleaning modules can be flexibly adapted to your requirements. For example, fresh water or recirculating cleaning is available, as is the dosing of one or more cleaning agents. Our intelligent modular system gives you the option of efficiently expanding your basic version at any time with individual additional modules to suit your requirements.
Our cleaning systems are also flexible when it comes to the control system: Whether stand-alone or integrated control, whether manual, semi-automatic or fully automatic cleaning run – you get the control system that suits your ideas.
Zone concepts according to GMP offer a high level of safety to protect products from contamination and cross-contamination.
Stainless steel stage, Glatt hygienic design
Panel feed-through, Glatt hygienic design
Clever hygienic design to avoid cross-contamination and handling of hazardous products
Frequent product changes and the associated risks of cross-contamination or the handling of products with potential hazards are among the challenges in production operations.
As an active member of the European Hygienic Engineering & Design Group EHEDG, Glatt is not only involved in the development of new guidelines, but also consistently implements them in clever hygiene concepts. The design, materials, roughness, product-contacting components and connections of our systems are therefore just as well thought-out as the necessary steps in the cleaning process.
If you want to establish and operate your own plant for processing foodstuffs, food supplements or their ingredients, you will first have to deal with the analysis and evaluation of risks to ensure product quality and purity as part of its quality management system. From this list of requirements, Glatt will draw up a concept at the beginning of the plant design phase, which may, for example, include specifications from Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and the EHEDG. This applies in particular when food additives or changing products are to be processed and cross-contamination must be ruled out. The EHEDG guidelines and GMP guidelines provide suitable specifications for this. Special requirements for measuring points, inspection and control options, or additional equipment such as safety devices or metal separators are also ideally included in the risk assessment at the initial stage. If particularly toxic substances are processed, protective measures and containment concepts must be developed for both production and cleaning procedures. An efficient containment concept that complies with FDA and ICH guidelines and the current EMA directive in force since June 1, 2015, includes not only technical protection solutions and personal safety equipment (PPE) for the operating personnel, but also an optimal maintenance and servicing strategy.
Published article: ‘Everything according to the rules – Hygiene design for fluid bed and spouted bed systems’ PDF, German
Published article: ‘Product safety for granulation and coating – Hygienic design for fluid bed and spouted bed systems’ PDF, German
Published article: ‘Better safe than sorry – Design safety for fluid bed systems’ PDF, German
Published article: ‘Cleanly separated – filters in fluid bed systems, an overview’ PDF, German
Published article: ‘Fluid bed systems: continuous, batch or a hybrid?’ PDF, German
Copyright: HPCi Media Limited
Copyright: Glatt