APACT2019 meeting report

ADVANCES IN PROCESS ANALYTICS AND CONTROL TECHNOLOGY

2019 CONFERENCE

Tuesday 30th April - Thursday 2nd May, 2019

PROCESS ANALYSIS session

The MSG sponsored the Process Analysis session at APACT19 (https://apact.co.uk/) in Chester, with around 60 of the ~125 delegates joining our parallel session. There were three excellent talks in the session from Giuseppe Forte (Johnson Matthey Technology Centre, UK), Mark Kemper (Tornado Spectral Systems, Inc., Canada) and Christian Lux (tec5 AG, Germany).

Giuseppe Forte started off the session with his talk "Dynamic drying monitoring of a fixed bed using 3D-electrical capacitance tomography” and its potential utilisation within the pharmaceutical, chemicals, consumable and food production industries. Recent advances in 3D-ECT multi-planar sensor technology now enables the whole of the drying region to be monitored and inter-plane measurements to be made, whereas in the past only sections of the bed where able to be analysed. 3D-ECT data was presented to show the drying of a pellet bed with a controlled gas flow of varying temperature and flow rate, with thermocouples, humidity probes and pressure transducers also in place to monitor the process using traditional methods. Not only does ECT provide information on drying end point, its also visualises the spatial observation for the moisture movement, offering a dramatic improvement in the ability to enhance further drying process designs and optimization at different scale.

Mark Kemper then spoke about “Beyond the boundaries of conventional spectroscopy: the benefit of high-throughput Raman for process analysis”. Mark discussed the challenges of obtaining adequate signal-to-noise whilst using an inherently low-signal technique, especially due to the impact of the European ATEX regulations which limits the permitted level of laser power which can be used in potentially explosive environments. The development of a second generation of High-Throughput Virtual Slit (HTVS) technology provides hope in this area through the use of improved photon management schemes which allow for either faster measurements or enhanced limits of detection.

The final speaker in the session was Christian Lux giving a talk on “PAT for industry 4.0: Developments in embedded spectrometer systems and Raman spectroscopy”. He described how the use of an embedded spectrometer approach with UV-VIS-NIR spectral sensors combines the proven benefits of diode-array spectrometer technology with update-free and low-maintenance hardware. On-board data processing capabilities allow complex signal processing and self-diagnosis, with real time results and status information sent directly to the process management system, enabling parameterization and evaluation against chemometric models. He also described applications of Raman spectroscopy on solids and liquids, which allows measurement of characteristic fingerprint spectra within seconds, with little or no sample preparation.

Steve Coombes

MSG committee member