Non contact measurement & inspection
ACCELERATED VACCINE PRODUCTION THANKS TO AUTOMATION
A
lthough it is less in the public eye, the establishment of efficient production and logistics is very important in vaccine production. Very large production capacities had to be set up in a very short
period of time to be able to quickly produce large volumes of vaccine against a globally circulating virus. This meant that automation was essential. One stage of the process involves the use of a robot to place vials filled with vaccine, also known as injectable ampoules, from a conveyor belt into drawers and to remove them again later. Goldfuß engineering developed the overall concept, which consists of several trolleys with drawers, robot cells, and conveyor systems. SIMON IBV was responsible for the development of the optical 3D system, which enables the robot to grasp the vials independently and without damage. The MVTec HALCON machine vision software is used for this purpose. The trolleys, which hold around 10,000 vials, serve as a buffer and transfer system between filling, quality control,
Vaccine production had to be ramped up quickly for a globally active company. Goldfuß engineering and SIMON IBV developed a robot-based solution for the process step involving loading and unloading trolleys with vials containing the vaccine. The process is fully automated thanks to the robots’ ability to work autonomously through the use of machine vision.
and packaging. Goldfuß engineering, based in Balingen, Baden-Württemberg, specialises in the development and production of robotic loading systems for packaging machines and custom solutions for laboratory automation. Siegfried Hameln, a global contract and development manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished products, commissioned the company to develop an automated process for buffering vials. The company Siegfried Hameln, in turn, was commissioned by the vaccine developer to produce the active ingredient. SIMON IBV was brought on board to provide the vision component of the robot cell. Based in Bayreuth in northern Bavaria, the company has cross-industry expertise in 2D and 3D optical testing and measuring systems.
ROBOT LOADS AND UNLOADS TROLLEYS WITH VACCINE
Goldfuß engineering developed a new robot cell for the step of loading and unloading the trolleys. Stephan Trunk from Goldfuß engineering explains: “This kind of automation solution has never been available on the market before. In comparable
applications, the vials are manually loaded into trays or boxes after filling, manually stacked on pallets or in Kanban trolleys, and subsequently depalletised again. This means that several employees are usually tied up with non-value- added activities. The new, automated process speeds things up, in part because employees can focus on more demanding tasks.”
The trolleys used feature nine drawers, with each drawer capable of holding 24 rows of 46 vials each. In total, one trolley can therefore hold almost 10,000 vials. By buffering such a large quantity, it is possible to flexibly control the capacity utilisation of the packaging system. The trolleys offer the additional advantage that random samples can be easily removed from them and fed back into the packaging process after quality assurance approval. Since the trolleys are mobile, they can be parked in cooling chambers so that the cold chain is not interrupted. During implementation, one particular challenge involved the deviations and different positions in which the trolleys are positioned, for instance, while the robots still have to
56 March 2025 Instrumentation Monthly
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