With the mega investment, Merck will expand its high-potent active pharmaceutical ingredient (Hpapi) and antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) manufacturing capabilities. The new 6,500-sq m facility is expected to be one of the largest Hpapi manufacturing facilities capable of handling single-digit nanogram occupational exposure limit materials.

Continuous production is steadily gaining momentum as a practical strategic option for pharmaceutical manufacture —  The market is actively looking for technical solutions and equipment manufacturer Glatt presented a new continuously operated process system at Achema which addressed the topic of Traceability and showed a solution which guarantees the operator a high level of pharmaceutical safety.

Repsol plans to adapt one of the units at its Tarragona industrial complex in Spain to manufacture highly specialised polymers which will prove beneficial to the automotive sector due to its superior impact resistance.

Bentley and Siemens recently held an online media session in which they announced that Bentley’s Plant Sight and Siemens’ Teamcenter Calm will be used together for the very first time to develop a unique digital twin solution. Both the companies will also be collaborating to develop a digital twin for Chandra Asri’s largest integrated petrochemical complex in Indonesia.

As part of a compounding plant, the new Add-A-Lot multi-ingredient handling system by Coperion enables fully automated recipe preparation that fulfills high demands for constant product quality, seamless documentation, and batch traceability.

Cellufoam, a lightweight, fiber-based foam material will be produced at Stora Enso’s pilot plant in Sweden. Utilised for protective packaging, the renewable foam can eliminate the need for oil-based polymer foams in the packaging industry.

A new Iludest distillation plant extends the limits of what is possible and enables the extremely pure separation of bitumen fractions in a packed distillation column. In this way the process engineers from Waldbüttelbrunn defy the thermodynamic limits of the ASTM Standards D2892 and D5236, and bring two seemingly incompatible requirements under one hat.

Under the terms of the contract, Exxon Mobil will purchase 2.5 million barrels of renewable diesel per year from Global Clean Energy’s refinery in California, USA for five years beginning from 2022.

The way GMP-compliant batch mixers work is determined by two synchronously rotating screw mixing tools. They carry goods upwards in the periphery and downwards in the centers, which creates an intensive cross-flow of the product flowing up and down.

Highly flexible and modular production plants with decentralised automation enable the process industry to react to fluctuations in demand. Decentralised controllers are perfect for this. Festo developed a tool for programming these controllers to enable simple application engineering in line with the Module Type Package (MTP) from Namur and ZVEI.