Head Powder designed and implemented a sealed pneumatic conveying project for pharmaceutical powders for a well-known pharmaceutical company in Deyang, Sichuan, helping the client achieve fully sealed, automated powder transfer from raw material feeding to the production workshop. This project adopts a conveying scheme combining negative and positive pressure, improving dust pollution, cross-contamination, and inefficiency caused by traditional manual transfer, helping pharmaceutical production comply with GMP standards.

Customer pain points

Before project implementation, the client faced the following prominent issues:

• During transportation, powder raw materials are exposed to the workshop environment, which easily generates dust and makes it difficult to meet GMP's strict cleanroom control requirements.
• Manual handling methods are inefficient, labor-intensive, and have a high rate of material loss, affecting production continuity.
• Various medicinal powders (such as traditional Chinese medicine extracts, Western medicine excipients, etc.) have large differences in physical properties (prone to moisture absorption, agglomeration, uneven particle size), making it difficult for traditional equipment to balance transport stability with anti-contamination characteristics.
• Production workshop space is limited, requiring system integration without disrupting the existing process layout.

Solutions and product advantages

To address these pain points, Head Powder offers the following comprehensive solutions:

• Fully enclosed conveying system:Using 304 stainless steel pipelines and quick-install sealed interfaces, there is no leakage throughout the process from the feeding station to all production equipment, effectively preventing dust leakage and cross-contamination, and meeting GMP in-line cleaning (CIP) requirements.
• Multi-mode pneumatic conveying:Switching between negative pressure dilute phase and positive pressure dense phase conveying modes according to powder characteristics, nitrogen protection is applied for moisture-prone materials, and anti-static measures are added for highly flowable materials, helping ensure the conveying process does not block pipes or arch in the process.
• Intelligent Control and Monitoring:Integrates PLC control system and human-machine interface to monitor parameters such as conveying pressure, flow, and material location in real time, supports automatic and manual switching, and can be integrated into the factory's MES system to achieve production data traceability.
• Modular design and on-site adaptation:Adopts a skid-mounted structure, allowing for quick on-site installation after factory prefabrication, without affecting the customer's original production line; At the same time, elbow angles and pipeline support schemes are customized for workshop height constraints to optimize space utilization.

After the project was put into operation, dust concentration in the customer's workshop dropped by more than 95%, material loss rate dropped to within 0.3%, switching cleaning time was shortened by 60%, annual capacity increased by about 30%, and overall operating costs were reduced. This case provides a replicable model of sealed delivery for similar pharmaceutical companies.