Clean Utility & Sustainability

In reference to pharmaceutical industry, Purified water, water for injection, Pure steam and nitrogen comes under the clean utilities. Being these utilities are in contact with the products preservation, transportation and dispensing is very critical. Operation of these systems consumes high energy, chemicals and generate waste water. Some of the sustainable practices we can adopt are as following.

1.????? Smaller is Better & Beautiful:

Estimate the requirement carefully meticulously and arrive at your requirement of minimum, average and maximum. Use the trusted formulae of uncertainty (1*min+4*av+1*max)/6 to arrive at the required flow when not sure about the requirement. Design the system at the required flow. This will make your system small and efficient. With smaller system the benefit comes along are

·??????? Lower capital cost

·??????? Lower operating cost

·??????? Lower chemical consumption

·??????? Lower energy consumption

·??????? Lower waste water and treatment cost

·??????? Lesser space requirement

·??????? Lower maintenance

·??????? Better ergonomics

·??????? Aesthetically good looking

2.????? Invest on Reliability

Anything that is not adding value, not a must should be avoided in other word we should be focusing on fit to requirement. Invariably, in most places these critical utilities technical requirement surpasses the acceptable specification. It is recommended to invest on better reliable component for consistent product quality. Few examples in this regard are as below.

·??????? Design sturdy system for pretreatment which will provided consistent quality of water demanded at the inlet of PW generation irrespective of season, source etc. Investment on better pretreatment will have better payback and high reliability.

·??????? Use power source EDI as recommended by OEM or rather source those from OEM. Do not use equivalent one. This small investment will aid to better EDI life.

·??????? Pretreatment and purified water room should be in different room. The chemicals of pretreatment might affect the equipment.

·??????? Install predictive maintenance system to take corrective action before failure to avoid batch stoppages due unavailability of PW/WFI/PS

·??????? Bypassing the return water to storage vessel and connecting to pump suction can save substantial energy.

·??????? Electropolishing add to cost and detrimental to environment, unless use this mindfully based on the tube quality and surface finish. Good tube manufacturer are providing tubes at a Ra of 0.5 to 0.8 without EP.

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3.????? Check your losses:

All drain points of the clean utilities system shall be evaluated carefully for its re use in some other application. By doing not only you are saving water which is a scarce resource but you avoid loading ETP unnecessarily with additional burden of treatment cost. Most of the drain water of Purified water generation and distribution (except for rejects) can be reutilized as feed water boiler.