The demonstration went so well that the pharmaceutical company challenged Gamajet with cleaning their dirtiest, most difficult to clean vessel in the plant. Gamajet was up to the challenge.
The 300 gallon tumbler contains yellow dye for pill coatings, and is approximately 15 feet in diameter and 12 feet high. The company was using manual labor to clean the interior of the vessel and the process was agonizingly slow and frequently did not pass inspection. The manual labor would typically take between 8 and 9 hours to clean, but 90 percent of the time it failed inspection. Therefore, the team would take another 8 to 9 hours to clean it, but 50 percent of the time it failed inspection again. Even after the tumblers finally passed the swab test, the company was not unfamiliar to contamination from the tumbler causing lost batches. The yellow dye in the tumbler is used in the highest produced, most expensive drug the company manufactures and the downtime was too much. The dye in one tumbler makes up to 4 million coated tablets. Not only was the current cleaning ineffective and time-consuming, but the manual labor was subject to injury and the overtime pay was adding up.
The Gamajet PowerFLEX was selected as the right rotary impingement cleaner for the job. The Gamajet engineers determined it should run at 220-240 psi at 50 – 60 gallons per minute, to create 18 lbs. of impact on the vessel interior. The PowerFLEX was inserted into the dirty tumbler. First, they ran the machine with ambient water for a 5 minute pre-rinse. Then the ambient water was mixed with sodium dioxide caustic for a 13 minute cleaning cycle, followed by a water-only 5 minute post-rinse.