VOC purification in the pharmaceutical industry

Guadalajara, Spain

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The pharmaceutical company Arafarma Group manufactures and markets medicines, food supplements and health products, with customers throughout Europe and the world. In the manufacturing process it produces emissions that contain VOCs, such as alcohol, isopropanol and acetone. These VOCs are subject to strict limits. In this plant, the VOC emissions from the different machines reach up to 980 mg/Nm3. The limit allowed to the company is 20 mgN/m³, so the environmental authorities pressured it to reduce the concentrations by treating the emissions.

 

Initially, the company thought about installing an RTO (thermal oxidation equipment). However, this technology requires continuous operation for the installation to be profitable, and the operation of the machines and production is discontinuous. After a meeting with our company, it was decided that activated carbon filtration was more suitable for their needs. The chimneys of each of the machines are conducted by means of a collector to the installation consisting of filters capable of treating 22,000 m3/h.

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