Prospect of Pharmaceutical Packaging Equipment

Prospects

Pharmaceutical packaging machinery is a branch of general packaging machinery with high technical content and requirements.

As pharmaceutical equipment is an important part of GMP standard technology, since the introduction of China's mandatory GMP certification system, pharmaceutical factories around the world have accelerated the pace of technological transformation, the substantial update of production equipment for the pharmaceutical industry's upstream industry.

Pharmaceutical machinery industry has brought a favorable situation, a large number of production line transformation for pharmaceutical machinery enterprises have brought a huge market.

For example, the ampoule (water needle) series wash-dry-fill-seal linkage unit introduced and developed by Changsha Zhengzhong Medicine Machine Factory has ended the history of single machine production used in China for decades.

After several improvements, the product has sold a total of more than 600 production lines and has also been exported to nearly 20 countries such as Brazil, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

Of course, as a whole, most of China's current research and development ,according to the more technologically advanced packaging machinery is still in the imitation class, the ability to develop independently is still very limited.

For this reason, many foreign large enterprises will introduce their own technology and components into China, in the local processing, thus reducing the cost, and local products to launch a fierce competition.

Some information shows that as early as 2003, the global pharmaceutical packaging market reached US$11.2 billion, with an average annual growth of nearly 5%, and in 2006 it was estimated to have exceeded US$13 billion.

The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy occupy the largest market share in the world's pharmaceutical packaging industry, while China is the fastest growing country. In line with the pace of development of China's pharmaceutical industry, the annual gross value of pharmaceutical packaging will rapidly exceed RMB 20 billion in the near future.

The annual output value of China's pharmaceutical packaging industry is approximately RMB 15 billion, with an annual growth rate of over 10%.

However, it can only meet about 80% of the needs of domestic pharmaceutical companies, and the contribution of packaging materials to the pharmaceutical industry is also low.

Development direction

China's packaging machinery has met the needs of the rapid development of the pharmaceutical industry, and actively participate in international competition, it is necessary to break the "small and scattered" industry trend, in the "high precision" in the direction of continuous progress.

Industry experts believe that the future of the packaging industry will cooperate with the trend of industrial automation, in the development of technology towards the diversification of mechanical functions, standardization of structural design, modular, intelligent control, high precision structure and several other directions.

Packaging chain is highly automated most of the packaging work in domestic pharmaceutical factories, especially the more complex packaging items of the arrangement, assembly and other work is basically manual operation, it is difficult to ensure the unity and stability of the packaging, may cause pollution of the packaged products.

Some pharmaceutical factories, even if they use packaging machinery, are only applied to a certain part of the entire packaging chain, such as the front section of the packaging using mechanical packaging, while the back section of the packaging is used manually.

Therefore, improving the level of automation and quality of the entire packaging chain is a very important part of the implementation of GMP norms in modern pharmaceutical companies. Each robot of a truly modern packaging machine should be controlled by a computer and have a high level of discrimination between materials and thickness.

Diversification

Diversification of mechanical functions pharmaceutical products have tended to refine and diversify the direction of development, single-species high-volume products are becoming less and less, while multi-variety small batch products are increasingly becoming mainstream. In the changing trend of the general environment, diversification, with a variety of switching functions, can adapt to a variety of packaging materials and mould replacement packaging machine can adapt to market demand.

For example, a blister packaging machine can be "aluminum-plastic" packaging and "aluminum aluminum" packaging, and requires simple switching, the need to replace the mold less.

The time required to change moulds is generally 1 to 2 hours, which is too long to adapt to the requirements of multi-variety, small batch production.

The modularity of structural design standards for traditional industrial design, if you want to launch a new model, you need to carry out a lot of heavy work, but also rely on new equipment to recover the high cost of design, thus driving up the price of new models.

Future designs should adopt a standardised, modular design concept that can make full use of the modular design of the original model, which can be converted into a new model in a short time and keep the price of the new model within a more reasonable range.

Intelligent

Control function intelligent control system is the brain of the machinery and equipment, but also the core device to give action instructions.

Pharmaceutical packaging machinery manufacturers commonly use programmable logic controllers (PLC controllers), which do not have the powerful functions possessed by industrial computers (PCs).

For most traditional machinery control equipment, the use of a PLC is appropriate because the number of parameters to be controlled is limited and many areas are still controlled mechanically, for example, torque control is the use of a mechanical clutch to protect the motor from overload.

However, with the increase in the degree of automation of equipment, computer-controlled equipment more and more, applied to the equipment of various sensing components, detection components, control components, the number of implementation elements is very large, at this time PLC will not be able to manage and control such a large number of parameters, and the industrial PC will be the best choice.

Conclusion

Pharmaceutical packaging machinery provides efficient solutions for preparing pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products for distribution. The newest pharmaceutical packaging equipment can include blister packaging machine,automatic cartoning machine,tablet counting machine,suppository filling machine,strip packing machine,effervescent tablet tube packing machine,etc.. Additionally, different types of liquid are used in the pharmaceutical industry. As such, each individual product requires a precise measurement that makes one unit-dose size different than the next. No matter the specific need, be it liquid or solid, today’s pharmaceutical packaging machinery needs to be flexible enough to work within the needs of the manufacturing and packing process for each unique situation.