Production of vaccine packaging with the help of ceramic cartridge heaters
⏱ approx. 8 minutes
DBK's heating elements are hidden in many applications we come across every day. They are hidden in electric vehicles, wind turbines or parking ticket machines.
This also applies to ceramic cartridge heaters, which make an important contribution to the Corona inoculation quite unnoticed.
How exactly does it work?
CUSTOMER / INDUSTRY
Manufacturer of clean room and pharmaceutical presses / mechanical engineering, pharmaceutical industry
Customer application
Mechanical and plant engineering is a large field of application for DBK's industrial heating solutions. Very often, different parts or tools of a machine must be pre-/heated for the production of e.g. plastic parts. That was also the case with our customer, a manufacturer of special presses from the southern Palatinate.
To be more specific, this project involves presses needed to produce vaccine caps. Vaccine caps serve as sealing plugs for vaccine containers and ensure sterile filling and secure sealing of the vaccine. When the Corona vaccines were licensed at the end of 2019, the need for such vaccine caps skyrocketed.
The customer approached us in November 2019: They were looking for a solution to heat up a hot plate that is used to mold the vaccine caps. For the mold, it is particularly important to distribute the temperature very homogeneously over the entire surface. The dimensioning of the heater was specified by the customer.
TECHNICAL SOLUTION
For homogeneous heating, two different heating elements had to be installed in the customer's heating plate in an alternating pattern. In addition, each heating element had to be equipped with two different heating zones which could be operated independently. This was the only way to ensure a flawless molding process of the vaccine caps.
Two ceramic cartridge heaters based on Wire Heating Technology were selected to match the customer's requirements and dimensional specifications:
Ceramic Cartridge Heaters
They feature a voltage of 240V/480V and a power of 350W/1270W - depending on the heating zone. Those two cartridges, which are approx. 1000mm in length, differ in the arrangement of their heating zones and were installed alternately in the heating plate. This arrangement succeeds to provide an even temperature distribution (+/- 2K) during the molding process of vaccine caps.