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Release date: 10th January 2003

Hot water system doubles pharmaceutical production capacity

A Spirax Sarco skid-mounted hot water system is enabling Janssen Pharmaceuticals, part of the Johnson & Johnson group, to more than double the capacity of part of its production facility at Little Island, County Cork.

The demand for hot water to heat five jacketed batch reactors varies depending on the number of reactors in use. A previous system fed the jackets from a 1 000 litre tank, which had to be at 65°C to 70°C before production could begin. Each jacket takes around 400 litres of hot water, so only two reactors could be heated simultaneously. Increases in production demand required more than two reactors to be heated at a time. To avoid staggering production, which reduces plant utilisation, it was decided to upgrade the hot water system.

The new Spirax Sarco system, now supplied from an insulated 6 000 litre tank, allows all five reactors on the hot water loop to start up simultaneously and almost immediately. This has allowed Janssen Pharmaceuticals to more than double the capacity of its processes that use hot water.

At the heart of the Spirax Sarco engineered system is a plate steam heat exchanger. One of the features in the Janssen Pharmaceuticals application is the wide variation in load on the heat exchanger. At low loads, the steam pressure can drop so much that it would be unable to force condensate out of the exchanger. If this occurred, a standard steam trap would be unable to drain condensate from the exchanger, causing it to become waterlogged, losing heating efficiency and even stalling.

To solve this problem a Spirax Sarco APT14 automatic pump trap is fitted to each exchanger to ensure that condensate is always removed, even under low loads when vacuum conditions could be created.

The engineered system was supplied complete with the pumps to send the water around the supply loop and a control panel that links with Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ plant-wide control system. This enables production operators to remotely monitor and control the hot water system from the central control room.

The system operates by taking cold water at around 25°C from the supply tank where it is raised to 70°C in the heat exchanger. This hot water is then fed into the pumped supply loop and tapped off to feed as many heating jackets as required.

As well as increasing capacity, the new system also improves the control of the hot water temperature over the full range of loads. It really improves production efficiency.

Caption: A Spirax Sarco skid-mounted hot water system is enabling Janssen Pharmaceuticals, part of the Johnson & Johnson group, to more than double the capacity of part of its production facility at Little Island, County Cork.

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Spirax-Sarco Limited Spirax-Sarco Limited is the world leader in the control and efficient use of steam and other industrial fluids.