By Paul Thomas, Senior Editor
At the 2011 PDA annual meeting, Juha Mattila, Product Manager for High Purity Water Systems and Effluent Decontamination Systems for Steris Finn-Aqua, presented a poster on his company’s new technology for automatically decontaminating effluent leaving pharma and biopharma facilities.
Mattila says his company’s new Automatic Solid Waste Separation & Sterilization Process is in start-up phase at several research and pharma manufacturing applications. The process is based on Steris' Continuous Effluent Decontamination system, described as follows: “The basic system includes a 40-liter pressure vessel that collects the solid particles from the incoming effluent stream. . . . Sanitary pneumatic butterfly valves isolate the pressure vessel during solid waste sterilization, and open/close drainage to remove sterilized solids to drain after de-pressurization and cooling. Steam and rinsing water inlets and condensate outlets are equipped with specific vacuum model pneumatic piston valves, and process temperature is controlled by analog temperature sensor placed in a non-process contact thermo-well and a steam control valve. Strainer plugging or strainer vessel filling is controlled by level switch upstream of the separator process.” The entire process is controlled by a PLC, he adds.
