Today's industry demands documented precision, safety and risk minimizing. Watson-Marlow Flexicon accomplishes these demands through our unique sterile filling systems.
Over the last few decades peristaltic sterile filling has been widely used for life support during open-heart surgery and dialysis. Peristaltic sterile filling is chosen for its sterility and reliability, as well as for its ability to handle live cells.
Peristaltic sterile filling principle
In a peristaltic liquid filler, a piece of tubing is compressed in a forward motion with the tube acting both as check valve and as transport mechanism. As the product is in contact only with the FDA approved silicone tubing, the product path is closed from the bulk tank to the end of the filling nozzle. It is simply the best system to avoid contamination and to provide risk minimizing.
The peristaltic mechanism is also very gentle towards the product, which is illustrated by the fact that the healthcare industry uses the principle for pumping blood products. This characteristic makes the fillers ideal for shear sensitive liquids such as blood products and bio-tech products with live cells in suspension.
The peristaltic system is ideal for filling sterile liquids with frequent product changes, as a change is just a matter of replacing the sterilized silicone tubing.
Typically, a peristaltic pump has a rotor with two rollers, which squeeze the tube up against a circular tube track. The flow from this type of pump head suffers from a very strong pulse whenever a roller leaves the tube track.
A peristaltic liquid filler relies on the positioning of the pump rotor to determine the volume of the fill, but it is not able to compen-sate for the inconsistent flow, which will reduce greatly the dose accuracy achieved. The accuracy of a fill is improved by increasing the number of rollers, which in turn increases the frequency of the pulse and in that way reduces, but not eliminates, the impact of a single pulse.
To counteract the inaccuracies inherent in traditional peristaltic sterile filling, Watson-Marlow Flexicon manufactures a pump head that is optimised for delivery of high accuracy fills. Peristaltic Sterile filling units utilise a rotor design with two individual rotor channels, each with six rollers. The rotor is designed so that one channel produces maximum flow rate as the other reduces to its minimum. By combining the output from both channels before the filling nozzle, the effect of pulsing is virtually eliminated. This together with the very precise microprocessor controlled position circuit gives the outstanding +/-0.5% accuracy claimed for Watson-Marlow Flexicon peristaltic liquid fillers.
Together with Watson-Marlow Flexicon quality silicone tubing the above peristaltic system is now the fastest growing in the pharmaceutical industry, and Watson-Marlow Flexicon is today considered to be the world's leading manufacturer of peristaltic liquid sterile filling systems.
Watson-Marlow Flexicon - your choice for sterile filling
