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 facility manufactures numerous products, and EA has developed and upgraded automation and controls components for the client since 2013.
The final step of IV bag production is bulk sterilization. During this process, large quantities of bags are placed in sealed vessels that must maintain precise temperature, pressure, and humidity control. The multi-step process must be monitored and highly repeatable without loss of information or errors. The client prioritized the fault-tolerance of the system, as failure would lead to discarding product, which would result in increased costs and delayed delivery.
EA installed a virtualized platform infrastructure to host the 66 virtual machines required to run and test the Wonderware InTouch based SCADA system. In addition, EA helped B. Braun upgrade all sterilization lines from older Foxboro DCS controllers to modern Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLCs. These were arranged in a fully redundant configuration so a processor or platform failover would not create a process failure.
