Stainless Steel Safety Light Curtains Master The Requirements Of The Pharmaceutical Industry

Cleaning, sterilizing, filling, closing, testing, labeling: the individual vials pass through several production stations. Consistent compliance with hygiene requirements is a challenge. As a rule, humans are the greatest source of contamination risk. The combination of state-of-the-art automation and isolator barrier technology guarantee the highest level of safety for packaging machines from Bausch + Ströbel. In the event of an emergency - such as set-up processes or production stoppages due to tolerance deviations depending on the packaging material - the operators can access the clean room via secure glove ports and reliably remedy faults. The light curtains protect the operator from an unexpected restart of the machine. If the hands are out of the limit,the machine can be started again safely, which then produces up to 24,000 vials per hour.

Everything within reach

The safety light curtain thus enables the shortest production interruption for maximum output and offers ideal protection and the highest level of safety for the operator at the highest level. "Our principle is that the machine must be designed so that we can shake hands from the beginning to the end of the production line," explains Jürgen Poisel, electrical engineer, Bausch + Ströbel Maschinenfabrik Ilshofen GmbH + Co.KG, "So we can we can easily reach any point on the machine by intervening in the isolator.”

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Wherever maximum hygiene is required, demands for stainless steel are loud. Because stainless steel is the material that meets the strictest clean room conditions and resistance to aggressive cleaning media such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Automation components such as safety light curtains are also exposed to aggressive cleaning media.

Meets all requirements

“We were looking for a stainless steel version for the safety light curtains for over three years. We asked our suppliers. Nobody was able to provide us with a suitable solution. By chance we came across the SG4-H stainless steel safety light curtain from Datalogic, which optimally fulfills our requirements in at least three ways. First, the safety light curtains are made of 316L stainless steel, which is particularly acid-resistant. Secondly, the safety light curtains are in short available at an optimal price-performance ratio. Thirdly, they are design pieces that support the optical flow of the system in stainless steel,”summarizes Poisel.

A safety light curtain, consisting of a light transmitter and receiver, generates infrared rays via electrical connections and creates a protective field. The distance between the two components results from the performance. The number of “component pairs” required is closely related to this. To ensure access to every corner of the system, the system concept can require up to twelve such pairs. In practice, this means twelve times two components that have to be connected.

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