The Challenge
In recent years, High Purity Systems (HPS) has seen a big push for equipment upgrades requiring expertise in biopharmaceutical orbital welding. As an experienced contractor and trusted partner with many life-science laboratories, we’ve been approached time and time again to help companies make these critical system updates.
Recently, a customer in this industry came to us with a time sensitive job that could not afford any downtime; one of their chromatography skids was in desperate need of revitalization. Functioning at suboptimal performance, this prevented the customer from getting accurate measurements on the ratios of their mixtures — a serious issue when pharmaceuticals are involved, as even minute discrepancies in the parts-per-million range can be catastrophic to an entire product batch. Because we had delivered systems to them in the past, this client knew that HPS could get the job done efficiently and on time.
And having heard specifically of our team’s previous experience with biopharmaceutical orbital welding and skid work of all sizes and functionalities, the customer knew we could manage the heavy workload and sensitive timeline.
The Strategy
HPS was tasked with completing a job that should have taken two and half weeks in just a one-week period—but this was nothing we couldn’t handle. Starting with the bottom of the skid, our field service crew relocated a 2-inch drain valve to the opposite side of the main valve. After we cut off the drain valve, we faced the remaining tube for welding, cleaned it, and manual TIG welded a new piece of 316L stainless steel tube in its place.
We then faced, cleaned, and welded the old drain valve into its new home and piped out an automated steam trap from the new drain valve location. We also needed to orbital weld a pressure controller into a line in the middle of the skid, along with two new sanitary ferrules. In the last part of the steam piping orbital welding phase, we cut in and installed a new temperature sensor on the skid.
All of the welds our team made were spot passivated, inspected, and documented to meet the FDA’s requirements for validated systems, as well as ASME BPE specifications. To make the documentation official, the inspection was borescoped and recorded by a third-party quality control team checking our work.
The Result
With nothing but a small list of instructions and a few photographs for reference from the customer, the HPS foreman and crew knew how to get the job done. Our team is proud to have earned this level of trust with our customers — the kind that is only built after years of delivering high-quality, reliable systems.
This customer trusted our team because they knew we were consistently safe in our processes and have had years of practical experience fabricating and installing bioprocessing equipment, sanitary pipe, and sanitary piping systems. With our qualified, detail-oriented craftsmen and meticulous, knowledgeable office staff, HPS is proud to be an industry-leading high-purity mechanical contractor specializing in biopharmaceutical orbital welding.
To learn more about our past work or discuss your next project, reach out today.
