Emerson DCS technology integrated into Sartorius bioreactors

Emerson has announced a collaboration with biopharmaceutical technology company Sartorius to natively integrate Sartorius’s Biostat STR Generation 3 family of bioreactors with Emerson’s DeltaV distributed control system (DCS). The Biostat STR Generation 3 for Emerson’s DeltaV, a variant of the Biostat STR Generation 3 family, is a pre-engineered solution designed to deliver simpler connectivity for accelerating and simplifying the process of bringing pharmaceutical therapies to market.

Life sciences companies often struggle to connect process equipment to their plant’s automation system because engineering and configuring equipment is complex and time-consuming. Biostat STR Generation 3 natively integrated with a plant’s DeltaV DCS eliminates this complexity for one of the most frequently used components of biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The bioreactors are specifically designed and pre-engineered with DeltaV components from the ground up by Sartorius. The configuration toolkit developed by Emerson and Sartorius has a library of templates that provide standardised configuration.

Using the library, teams can integrate bioreactors into their control system quickly and easily out of the box. Commercial manufacturing sites expect to save up to 80% of their equipment integration time, and the increased automation reduces the need for manual operation, ultimately increasing quality and speeding up time to market.

“One of the biggest barriers to fast delivery of new treatments is the time it takes to connect new equipment to the plant’s control system,” said Nathan Pettus, President of Emerson’s process systems and solutions business. “Working closely with Sartorius to seamlessly incorporate our DeltaV technologies and software into Sartorius bioreactors, we jointly have made one of the most critical components of biopharmaceutical manufacturing ready to connect out of the box.”

Biostat STR Generation 3 bioreactors integrated with Emerson’s DeltaV DCS are built with technologies, including DeltaV Electronic Marshalling with CHARMs devices, to reduce wiring and configuration work during installation. The bioreactors can integrate seamlessly with Emerson’s DeltaV PK controller as well as S-Series and M-Series controllers. Built-in templates provide standardised configurations for the most common uses, allowing teams to use standard set-ups out of the box to bring operations online rapidly and safely and allow them to change those operations quickly to meet shifting market needs.

“The biopharmaceutical industry requires modular and scalable bioprocess equipment to help quickly and easily manufacture the treatments patients around the world are waiting for,” said Mario Becker, head of bioreactor technologies at Sartorius. “By integrating Emerson software and technology into our new Biostat STR DeltaV variant, we help our customers rapidly bring their operations online.”