Health is wealth

It is rightly said that the greatest wealth is health. Doctors primarily help us in maintaining our health. But it would not be possible for them to do their jobs if it wasn’t for those tiny, life-saving capsules. ACG Pam-Pharma Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a trusted name when it comes to capsule weighing and keeping the weight of the ingredients to the permitted dosage per capsule. With B&R, ACG-Pam provides the best in-class solution to its customer

ACG-Pam is a member of ACG Worldwide, which has been serving the pharmaceutical industry for five decades. It is the second largest manufacturer of empty hard capsules in the world. They offer a complete range of solutions beginning with empty capsules, granulation and coating, capsule filling, tableting, packaging films, blister packing and carton packing to the end-of-line solutions. ACG-Pam has been pioneering in newer technologies for over forty years, and is helping the pharmaceutical industry address its challenges. The company offers unique capsule filling and tablet compression equipment capable of customised capabilities and containment. To optimise the production processes, ACG-Pam offers 100% capsule checkweighers and other ancillary equipment.

Customer Quotes

“The level of confidence in our sales and service teams is incredibly high. The B&R hardware robustness and software flexibility has helped us cater to our customers in the best possible manner.”
– Jadadish Kadu, General Manager – Operations, ACG Pam-Pharma Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

“Working with B&R was easy and we were very comfortable. The entire B&R team was very receptive and have exceptional expertise. They offered us excellent support. This expertise combined with the hardware and software facilitated the lowest time to market this machine.”
– Vinayak Kelkar, Head of Electronics Department, ACG Pam-Pharma Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

As the pharma industry grows, so does the competition, pushing companies to comply with strict rules and regulations of the US FDA, which regulates almost every facet of prescription drugs, including testing, manufacturing and safety. Hence, each and every capsule manufactured needs to be closely inspected. “We at ACG-Pam are committed to providing world class machines for FDA approved companies and for those companies eyeing to comply with the US FDA,” sights Jagadish Kadu, General Manager – Operations, ACG Pam-Pharma Technologies Pvt. Ltd. “To cater to these rising demands of the market for complying with the US FDA, we launched our ACCURA checkweighing machines in 2013.”

100,000 capsules/ hour

The main motivation of the development of ACCURA for checkweighing was for the users to comply with the US FDA. “To provide our customers with the best possible machine, we paid attention to the primary customer needs, improving the setup times, robust product and better hardware and software reliability,”  mentions Jagadish Kadu. This  machine was developed by Scitech Centre, which is the R&D center for ACG Worldwide jointly with ACG-Pam and combining the expertise of B&R. ACCURA checkweighers can be easily integrated with existing high speed encapsulation machine for pre-fill or post-fill checkweighing. Enhancing the quality of capsules, the ACCURA ensures that every capsule is well within compliance limits.

Handling 100,000 capsules/ hour, the machine is the fastest capsule weighing application available in the market today. The machine is automated by using the highly efficient and intelligent ACOPOS servo drives. These drives provide the best possible synchronisation on Ethernet POWERLINK.

ACOPOS Drives

B&R’s ACOPOS servo drives provide the best in-class precision and accuracy as they are equipped with drive-to-drive communication. These intelligent servo drives run at microsecond cycle times

The machine has a magazine where all the capsules are loaded. A motor is used to load the capsules in the magazine before the machine can be operated. The machine makes use of the 4 servo axes. Capsules from the loader are loaded in the V-pan of the load cell, where the capsules are weighed. Each and every capsule is checked for the weight and then ejected out of the V-pan. The weights are transferred to the SCADA systems via the powerful B&R controller X20CP3585 over Ethernet. If the weight of the capsule is appropriate, it is ejected into the accept-bin else into the reject-bin. Another axis then pushes the capsule on the right track post ejection. All these axes need to be perfectly synchronised for achieving accuracy and precision.

Performance simplified

The X20 controllers provide exceptional performance for necessary decentralised operation coupled with the ACOPOS servo drives. Thanks to multitasking, the user gets complete flexibility and highest performance necessary for such complex applications. The ACOPOS servo drives have inbuilt features such as cross communication and synchronisation down to 0.1µs. These features, combined with the open source, real-time, deterministic Ethernet POWERLINK network, enable the high-speed operations in the machines. B&R’s Automation Studio, which is a single tool for programming all the devices, uses IEC-61131 programming languages as well as object oriented programming offers unlimited freedom of programming.

“Owing to the reliable hardware and flexible software, we have used B&R controls on ACCURA checkweigher machines,” mentions Vinayak Kelkar, Head of Electronics Department, ACG Pam-Pharma Technologies Pvt. Ltd. “Working with B&R was easy and we were very comfortable. The entire B&R team was very receptive and have exceptional expertise. They offered us excellent support. This expertise combined with the hardware and software facilitated the lowest time to market this machine.”

Easier way of solving complex applications

B&R has always been at the forefront of effortlessly providing solutions to the most complex applications in any industry. With ACG Worldwide, it was nothing different. The high quality B&R hardware, software and the technical team’s excellence made the development and commissioning of the complex ACCURA checkweigher machines easy. The power of B&R systems lies in consistent design of all modules – compatibility in interfaces and inter-operability, matching operating cycles, integrated programming and diagnostics capabilities. All this yields a performance greater than the sum of the parts.

“The level of confidence in our sales and service teams is incredibly high. The B&R hardware robustness and software flexibility has helped us cater to our customers in the best possible manner,” asserts Jagadish Kadu. “Thanks to B&R, we have been able to reduce the buffer for software validations to a great extent. Once the mechanical and electrical teams complete the machine, it just takes a couple of days for testing the machine for quality and then it is ready for dispatch.”

ACG-Pam has been associated with B&R for a long time for various machines. The technical expertise offered by the B&R teams and the collaborative approach enables the user to become all the more technically competent.