Reducing Cleaining Cycle Time by 80% with the Use of a Better Valve
One Holland’s pharmaceutical customers was using ball valves to fill small bottles. The valves would actuate 500-600 times per product run. They would then have to be disassembled and cleaned.
The valves had 20 plus parts. The time that it took to disassemble, clean, and reassemble was approximately 2 hours per valve. There were 18 heads on the filler and each head had one valve, resulting in a cleaning time of 36 hours. Because of the extended time it took them to clean the valves the customer had to stock a complete extra set of valves..
Going through the process and understanding the flow path, we proposed to the client to use the ITT Pure-Flo ISG valve for the filling application. Since there are only 8 screws per valve, and two diaphragms, the time to disassemble, clean and reassemble went to 15 minutes per valve, approximately a 5 hour cleaning cycle instead of 36. This allowed to client to have to stock only one set of valves, reducing both cost and downtime