Among process industries, pharmaceutical manufacturing has a wide variety of special characteristics related to its final products. Just as oil refining has to be concerned about flammability, pharma is all about purity, and the design of its equipment and techniques reflects this focus. So how does wireless instrumentation fit into this picture?
Brian Joe tackles the question in the June 2018 issue of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing with his article titled Making the Case for Wireless on the Plant Floor. He divides the larger pharma manufacturing picture into three main areas, and goes on to explain how wireless in general and WirelessHART in particular can be applied.
The benefits of wireless instrumentation and a supporting network can be realized in three key areas within pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities:
These three areas are distinct, so let’s look at each individually, and consider how wireless devices can be used and how the networks interact.
The first one seems odd because pharmaceutical-grade instrumentation has special connections, electropolished finishes and so forth. Most native WirelessHART instruments use conventional industrial configurations, so how do those go together?
Many typical process instruments (flow, level, temperature, pressure, etc.) are available as native WirelessHART devices with an internal power module and permanently mounted antenna, but few are available with a hygienic design suited for product contact in pharmaceutical applications. Nonetheless, any hygienic wired device using 4-20 mA with HART can be outfitted with an external WirelessHART adapter so it can communicate on the wireless network.
So a typical practice could be to select a hygienic device, such as the Rosemount 3051HT, and equip it with an Emerson Wireless 775 THUM adapter. But that’s not all:
There are also instruments designed to mount without touching the process directly, so they do not need a specific hygienic configuration. For example, a transmitter with Emerson’s Rosemount X-well technology can be mounted on the outside of a pipe and take a temperature reading without penetrating the process. It communicates via WirelessHART, so it can be placed anywhere within the coverage of the network.
The second point applies in pharma environments just as it does in all kinds of manufacturing facilities:
Many pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are deploying wireless instrumentation designed to monitor various types of in-plant systems and utilities to control costs, boost performance and improve efficiency. A wide variety of devices can be used to monitor steam traps, check the various elements of pumps, measure processed water usage and the like. These monitoring devices can operate on the same networks as the WirelessHART process instruments, reporting their data through the gateway and on to the larger plant networks.
The third point explains how WirelessHART makes mobility easy, which simplifies life when it is necessary to move equipment around a facility.
Ultimately, Brian makes some critical points about wireless infrastructure, how it should be implemented and how it supports larger IIoT deployments—so the article is well worth a full read. As he sums up:
[Wireless] is changing manufacturing on all fronts, and it can have a profound impact on pharmaceutical producers. The IIoT facilitates data collection, analysis and movement more quickly than any mechanism to date. The ability to reach the cloud is very easy, supporting data access from anywhere.
You can find more information like this and meet with other people looking at the same kinds of situations in the Emerson Exchange365 community. It’s a place where you can communicate and exchange information with experts and peers in all sorts of industries around the world. Look for the Life Sciences Group and other specialty areas for suggestions and answers.