IV Bag Sterilization Line
B. Braun Medical Inc.
Customer Background
B. Braun Medical is one of the largest privately held medical products manufacturing companies. They produce everything from IV bags and containers to catheters and syringes. Their Irvine CA facility manufactures numerous products and EA has helped develop and upgrade automation and controls components there since 2013.
Project Background
As part of the production of IV Bags, the final step is bulk sterilization. During this process, large quantities of product are placed in sealed vessels that have precise temperature, pressure, and humidity control. The multi-step process must be monitored and highly repeatable without loss of information or errors. In addition, the system must be fault-tolerant as any product that is in process during a failure must be discarded, resulting in increased costs and delayed delivery.
EA Solutions
EA has installed a virtualized platform infrastructure to host the sixty-six virtual machines required to run and test the Wonderware InTouch based SCADA system. In addition, EA has helped B. Braun upgrade all of their sterilization lines from older Foxboro DCS controllers to modern Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLCs. These are arranged in a fully redundant configuration where a processor or platform failover will not create a process failure.
Key Insights
- High system reliability and data integrity were critical
Key Technologies:
- Wonderware System Platform
- Redundant Allen-Bradley ControlLogix
- Wonderware Historian
- Wonderware InBatch
Project Metrics:
- EA’s Services Value: $2.25M
- Project Length: 5 years
