Technology: Pharmaceutical water treatment

By OEM Update Editorial May 12, 2017 12:21 pm IST

This article presents innovative technologies to effectively treat pharmaceutical wastewater.

In the pharmaceutical industry, water plays a critical role and is the most widely used substance both for production and for washing equipment, containers, or vessels. However, as water is a scare resource, it is necessary to deploy innovative technologies for treatment of pharmaceutical wastewater. Here we highlight some of the technologies that are used to treat pharmaceutical wastewater effectively.

Ozone in pharmaceuticals water treatment
Sunil Shah, Director – Technical, Chemtronics Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd elaborates the major use of ozone in pharmaceuticals water treatment:
Raw water ozonation
Pharmaceutical industries can have diversified source of water which needs to be treated and disinfected for general usage. Ozonation at the entry level oxidises organic impurities, remove any presence of colour and odour and quickly disinfects the raw water. Distinct advantage is post treatment excess ozone reverts to natural oxygen without any addition of chemical or any extra effort also disinfectant by-products are harmless and treatment is environmental friendly. Ozone also eliminates the use of chlorine and activated carbon filter which is a breeding ground for bacteria.

Centralised & local process water ozonation
To keep process water sterile all the time ozonated water is circulated continuously. Residual dissolved ozone in quenched out just before the use in product or process. This provides very high-quality water.

Surface & equipment ozone sanitation
In pharmaceutical and medical industry it is very essential to keep all process area, tanks, equipment, furniture in highly disinfected condition. This can very easily be achieved using ozone surface sanitation. Washing and rinsing with high dissolved ozone can very quickly disinfects with no residual by-product to be further treated.

Clean-In-Place (CIP)
In pharmaceutical industries, CIP is the most critical for all process and quality purpose. Ozone CIP is the most effective and popular trend in pharma, dairy, food and beverage industries. Ozone CIP give extreme disinfection without the use of hot water or steam. Operation time is greatly reduced with confidence of process. In Ozone CIP no rinsing is required, reducing entire process cycle and post CIP ozone naturally disintegrates to safe oxygen.

Ozone also finds its use in air disinfection in production, packaging and storage areas to keep the atmosphere in bacteriostatic condition.

Waste water or STP tertiary stage ozonation
Using ozone in waste water and STP tertiary treatment in place of chlorine is mandatory from environmental compliances. Ozone in tertiary treatment disinfects waste water with odour and colour reduction. This gives more reasons to use tertiary treated waste water in flushing, cooling tower make up water or gardening.

Cooling tower water ozonation
Ozone water treatment is cooling tower, gives higher efficiency in slime control without increase in chemicals rather ozone reduces chemical consumption. Reduction in chemicals reduces blown down quantity of water.

Water filter technology for pharma
Pharmaceutical industry requires consistent, high-quality water for production. There is the need to evaluate new technologies and integrated solutions to reduce water consumption. “Most high quality makeup water systems used within pharmaceutical production must be free from microbial bacteria within the water and on the wetted surfaces of the filter system,” suggests Ashok Prasad, Proposal Manager, Filter Concept Pvt Ltd. However, he observes, the most challenging in designing the best system is to fulfil the above requirement. So to control microbial bacterial formation zero retention system must be design and also the contamination must be filtered in the system and after the process completion, system must be sterilised.

Filter Concept provides a range of product with zero hold up design to ensure zero retention and after the process completion and system can be taken to sterilisation to avoid any bacterial formation. They have an integral bayonet locator providing efficient seal between housing and its consumables. Application fluid can be filtered from range of 0.1 micron to 10 micron for the above technology with all the consumables in suits in accordance to pharmaceuticals grade and FDA certified.