FEATURE Medical
IntElect to support medical device development at Avenue, a Nolato company
A
venue, a Nolato company, has taken delivery of a 75-tonne IntElect all-electric injection- moulding machine at its site in Sligo, Ireland, describing it as “the ideal machine for medical start-up projects”. The equipment will support growth in the company’s healthcare division, providing dedicated capacity to mould precision parts during the product development phase. “A lot of our medical-device projects start with a development phase, when we need to produce a single- or two-cavity tool before scaling up,” said Gerard Henn, General Manager of Avenue. “The footprint of the IntElect is compact and it comes with a number of process-control features with all the interfaces needed to seamlessly connect with other equipment.” Since its beginnings in 1988, Avenue has become a trusted partner for medical device and drug delivery OEMs and contract manufacturers. Accredited to ISO
9001 and ISO 13485, Avenue specialises in the design, manufacture and validation of high-precision multi-cavity injection moulds and contract injection moulding for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. With demand for its medical device injection moulding and tool-building services on the rise, in summer 2019, Avenue installed a new 100m2
ISO
Class 8 cleanroom area at its Sligo facility. The expansion necessitated an increase in capacity for moulding tools for producing components such as vials, test trays, luer lock fi tments and connectors, as well as shell housing mouldings and mating components for medical device assemblies, which all need testing. “All medical programmes are lengthy, it can take two to three years to obtain approvals from the authorities, so there are many months of testing before a component or mould is ready for mass production,” added Henn.
CONTACT:
Avenue – Nolato
www.nolato.com
Autonomy and repetition accuracy in automated liquid handling
Automated liquid-handling systems are accelerating the discovery of safe and eff ective drugs, increasing throughput and reducing human error. However, the need for external air supplies can restrict installation space. Also, the multiple dosing of liquids places very high demand on repetition accuracy. Festo now claims to have found solutions to both challenges.
When designing devices for liquids operated by compressed air, external compressed air sources must always be considered because liquid-handling systems usually require a constant air supply. The most typical supply is via a wall connection, but this restricts the system’s fl exibility, and having to retrofi t air ducts can make it expensive, too. Now, Festo developed a module for generating pressure and vacuum that does away with the need for compressed air supply via supply lines. This compact sub-module is an integral part of the liquid- handling system. The generator builds up a specifi c pressure and vacuum. If the values
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fall below a particular threshold value, the supply is activated and the pressure and vacuum is built up again, achieved with sensors, a pump and a distributor. For multiple dosing with maximum
repetition accuracy, Festo has designed a special manifold duct plate with a reservoir for the dosing head, which makes it possible to draw in up to 2ml of liquid. The dosing head works in conjunction with a scale positioned under the microwell plate, thus creating a closed feedback circuit for the dosing process. The pneumatic valve’s opening time can be fi ne tuned through continuous feedback to achieve accurate dosing volumes.
After drawing in the required volume for the total dosage, the liquid is dispensed into each well in three injection phases. Most of the liquid is dispensed during the fi rst and longest phase. The second injection phase is shorter and gets closer to the required volume. The last injection is very short to achieve the exact fi lling quantity. The precision of this approach means that
accuracies better than 1% CV can be achieved. This solution includes a graphical user interface (GUI), which allows laboratories to carry out tests to meet individual requirements without having to reset the system every time. The user can select from which vial to aspirate, how much fl uid is dispensed into each well of a microwell plate, and how many wells are to be fi lled in a particular row. Whilst the liquid is being dispensed, the GUI provides a live display of the scale to indicate the amount of liquid dispensed. The amount of liquid is used to calculate the average mass and the coeffi cient of variation (CV) of the dosage. The GUI gives the user access to additional functions such as rinsing the liquid in the manifold duct plate until only air is left, or cleaning the manifold duct plate by drawing in and rinsing using a cleaning solution.
CONTACT:
Festo
www.festo.com
Automation | December/January 2022
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