Process Control

Today many manufacturers are striving not only to produce the highest quality final product but also to improve manufacturing efficiency by taking analysis technology from the laboratory and applying it in their plants.

By gaining tighter control over the manufacturing process, it is possible to optimize the use of materials and reduce or eliminate the production of off-specification material, thus saving reprocessing or disposal costs. Main laboratory applications for the pharmaceutical industry include identification of raw materials and quality control of finished products.
Common process control applications include direct monitoring of chemical reactions and quality of intermediate and final products such as:

• Determination of homogeneity of blending processes in the petrochemical, pharmaceutical and food industries.
• Determination of concentrations of constituent chemicals in refining operations in the chemical and petrochemical industries.
• Determination of the state of polymerization processes in the chemical and polymer industries.

FT-NIR is an ideally suited spectroscopic technique for process measurements because of its ability to rapidly perform remote measurements via high efficiency quartz fiber optics. NIR fiber optic probes are robust, relatively inexpensive, and widely available. Process probes may be located directly in process streams at a distance of hundreds of meters from the spectrometer, and multiple probes may be attached to a single spectrometer.

Bruker offers MATRIX-F FT-NIR spectrometers as the complete solution for your Process Control & Monitoring needs. In addition, the MID-IR OEM spectrometer IRcube is available with a wide variety of mid-infrared sampling configurations, ideal reaction monitoring platform for research, pilot plants, and production environments.

• Real Time Monitoring of Blend Ratio, Blend Uniformity, Drying Process.
• Quality Control of Potency, Excipient Levels and Moisture Content.
• Sampling accessories- Off-line, At-line, In-line
• Easy-to-use software for automated model building, process analysis and control
• Full range of industry standard communication protocols - 4-20mA, Ethernet, Modbus, Profibus DP, OPC, etc.
• Process Engineering expertise for smooth plant integration and service.
• Bruker Optics offers the industries most comprehensive range of PAT (Process Analytical Technology) solutions based on vibrational spectroscopy

To maximaze the process control for higher quality products by high resolution 2D/3D elemental analysis, Bruker's micro-spot X-ray fluorescence (Micro-XRF) tabletop instruments and electron microscope analyzers provide non-destructive methods and tools for spatially resolved compositional, layer thickness and crystallograpic analysis solutions.

The M1 MISTRAL and M4 TORNADO Micro-XRF instruments provide compositional and coating thickness analysis for those routine and special QA/QC tasks. The M4 TORNADO is also capable of performing spatially resolved element or layer thickness distribution maps to see variations in composition when failure analysis is required.

Scanning and transmission electron microscopes (SEM and TEM) provide the opportunity to use the Bruker QUANTAX system to perform energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) for inorganic material analysis at the highest of spatial resolutions. Using the XSense wavelength-dispersive spectrometer, challenging materials in the low energy or light element range can be better determined due to its excellent energy resolution. Using the SEM based QUANTAX EBSD (electron backscattered diffraction) system, crystal orientation maps can be acquired to understand the crystallography and phase boundaries, and study deformations in materials. Lastly, the XTrace allows the combination of Micro-XRF and EDS analysis on the SEM, providing the high sensitivity to trace elements of Micro-XRF and the light element performance of EDS.