Italy machinery maker fills flow metering gap

Parma, Italy – GF SpA, an Italian manufacturer of filling equipment and quality control systems, has switched to a new flow metering technology to reduce filling times, improve accuracy and repeatability, and achieve tighter filling tolerances with its machines.

Parma, Italy-based GF has installed Emerson’s Micro Motion Model filling mass transmitter (FMT) to its filling machinery. This is used for the precision measurement of injectables, infusions, ophthalmic preparations, syrups and detergent solutions.

“In this highly competitive market, we are always looking for ways to improve the performance of our machines,” said Marco Serventi, sales manager at GF, which principally supplies the pharmaceuticals, medical and food industries.

GF had been using filling technologies based on time-pressure instruments, as well as piston-syringe and peristaltic pumps, for filling machines being supplied to the pharmaceutical industry.

The company decided to improve the speed and accuracy of its machines and also enable its customers to change media without the need to replace the measuring instrument. It also wanted to enable in-line sterilisation without disassembling the machine.

GF met these objectives by using the Model FMT filling mass transmitter with Micro Motion ELITE and H-Series flow meters.

For example, said Emerson, it was able to improve system response time and reduce batch cycle times using integrated valve control from the transmitter, rather than the traditional pulse output set up through a PLC.

In addition, the rangeability of the Coriolis flowmeter allows different media to be dispensed without changing any mechanical components of the machine. For example, fillings can be in the range from 0.5g to 5Kg.

“The high reliability and accurate results provided by the [new] instruments have now been validated by GF customers over a number of successful applications,” continued Serventi, noting that GF has now adopted Micro Motion meters on a range of filling machinery.