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IMA and MAYEKAWA announced that IMA Life, headquartered in Bologna, Italy, has standardized on the company’s refrigeration technology for integration into aseptic processing and freeze drying equipment for the pharmaceutical industry.
IMA Life, a division of IMA S.p.A., offers machines to meet the demanding requirements of the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. The company offers machines for washing and de-pyrogenation of pharmaceutical vials, filling and stoppering in aseptic environments of vials, ampoules and syringes, including isolation technology and containment solutions. Other applications include filling and closing of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, micro-dosing of aseptic powders, as well as industrial, pilot and laboratory freeze-dryers, which can be combined with the industry’s widest range of automated loading and unloading system solutions.
The European regulation n°517/2014 of May 2015 implies a drastic reduction of fluorinated gases with high impact on global warming. Moreover, in 2020, the use of commonly used refrigerant in freeze dryers may be prohibited for maintenance or service of refrigeration equipment. A new solution which uses an air based refrigeration system is presented here below. The refrigeration gas being replaced by air is referred to as the ultimate natural refrigerant.
The R404A is commonly used in freeze-drying facilities and its GWP is 3922. Although the new law provides an exemption for applications which cool products at temperatures below -50°C, it is time to question the solutions for the future. New refrigerants have appeared on the market with a GWP below 2500. They generally involve restrictive conditions of use and may not conform to future regulatory changes.
IMA Life now propose to equip its freeze dryers with a new refrigeration technology using the ultimate natural refrigerant “air”. The system is based on a series of compression/cooling/expansion steps of AIR, which can be cooled to a temperature as low as -100 ° C.
