Anderson has worked with this confidential client for a number of years now where we have been involved in supplying them with reverse osmosis (RO) storage tanks. The tanks we supply them are used for storage of purified water mainly for the pharmaceutical industry as they supply hygienic water solutions to pharmaceutical clients.
For this recent project, we were required to develop WFI tanks. “Water for injection” tanks require the highest standard of hygiene engineering and GMP compliance. These pharmaceutical-grade processing tanks, which were part of a processing plant for an international producer of WFI products as a supplier to a hospital environment.
Initially, we were only going to supply tanks for the project but after several meetings, a tour of our premises, demonstrating to the client our full capabilities, as well as our commitment to meet an extremely tight deadline, we were awarded the full project scope. Over and above this, we were later awarded the mixing phase of the project, running this concurrently with the tank build and ultimately delivering both projects to the client at the same time.
A unique design innovation for us on this project was the in-house manufacture of the sanitary flanges, which were required for the project. These specialised flanges, which are currently not available in South Africa, have a unique design for the hygienic attachment of the nozzle to a tank. Ordinarily, when you join a nozzle on a tank you have a “dead leg”, or rather a pipe raised off the tank. We worked on the design of these specialist flanges, to ensure they sit flush and can be machined in such a way it mitigates the “dead leg”. Bringing the production of these flanges in-house meant we saved considerable time on the project as opposed to importing the flanges. Inhouse design and manufacturing further enabled us to improve and perfect the design according to our requirements as we were able to control the quality standard of the flanges ensuring that it is fit for purpose.
The full scope of the project included:
- 3 x 13,000 litre Stainless Steel tanks – mirror polished internal surfaces
- 3 x 10,000 litre Stainless Steel tanks – mirror polished internal surfaces
- 1 x 2,500 litre Stainless Steel tank – mirror polished internal surfaces
- All the tanks were pressure vessels with special AIA requirements
- 3 x flame-proof Andjet Mixers for the 10,000 litre tanks
- 1 x Andjet Mixer for the 2,500 litre tank
- 1 x Magnetic Mixer for one of the 13,000 litre tanks
- Supply of Anderson designed and manufactured EX rated sight glass lights
- Supply of all GMP documentation (IQ, OQ, SOP etc)
- All tanks were ex-rated / flame-proof
The most demanding elements of the project were the need for extremely high quality in the short turn around to delivery allowed for in this project. The inside surfaces of all tanks were polished to a RA value of 0.4 micronfinish. Anderson Engineering takes pride to be a supplier of exceptional quality products to the pharmaceutical industry and this WFI project allowed us to demonstrate our abilities and capabilities on all aspects of hygiene processing and engineering – to the highest quality and standards under tight project deadlines.
