Blood Plasma Processing Line

Bottles of frozen blood plasma are brought to the machine in bins from a freezer where they are stored at -30C. The bins are loaded into a bin lifter and dumped into a feed system that discharges a single file line of bottles to an orientation station. The bottles are oriented and fed into a pre-wash conveyor which rinses the outside of the bottles for 30 seconds and presents them to the entrance of 16 rotating thawing tubes. 

The 16 bottles are then pushed into the thawing tubes. The thawing tubes are rotated at 200 rpm and warm water is injected to thaw the plasma. This agitates the bottle to slowly and uniformly thaw the plasma without any of the plasma exceeding a temperature or 6C during the process. From the thawing tubes, the bottles are loaded into nests on an indexed carousel where the exterior of the bottles is washed again, dried, and sterilized with UV light.

After this, the bottles are loaded 2 up into dual nests on a 12 position indexed dial plate where the top is cut off of the bottles and they are inverted and the slushy contents are allowed to drain out into a final thaw tank where the contents are stirred until the plasma it completely thawed. 

The empty bottles are offloaded onto a conveyor.
The entire system is housed in three separate clean rooms. The first room is for loading the bins and feeding the bottles, this is the least clean area. The second room houses the Pre-Wash conveyor, the thawing tubes and the cleaning conveyor, this room is cleaner than the first room. The final room houses the dial that cuts the bottles and dumps out the plasma into the final thaw tank; this is the cleanest area since exposed plasma is always present. 

The machine is equipped with a CIP (Clean In Place) system. The machine contains a system of nozzles that can clean all of the interior surfaces and a system to automatically tie all of the thawing tubes together so cleaning agents can be pumped through all of the thawing tubes to clean them.