44th FVI Expert Breakfast

Topic: "Practical Knowledge from Pharmaceutical Maintenance" – Preventive Dry Gas Cleaning as a Component for System Availability, Energy Efficiency, and Operational Safety.

The session combined the perspective of a pharmaceutical contract manufacturer with the expertise of a specialized cleaning service provider. The focus was not on optical cleanliness, but on the functional contribution of professional cleaning to preventive maintenance.

• Contamination is a technical failure risk: Dust, oil, and other deposits act like thermal insulation. Especially in warm technical rooms, this can cause PLC components, frequency converters, or other electronic parts to fail more quickly. After cleaning control cabinets and production systems, significantly fewer thermal-related disruptions were observed in practical operation.
• Cooling systems show the economic benefit particularly clearly: In a more than 30-year-old large cooling system, the cooling performance was regularly insufficient in summer. Previous wet cleanings only brought short-term improvements and led to new problems due to calcareous water. After the dry cleaning of the cooling towers, the performance improvement remained for about two years.
• Gentle cleaning instead of aggressive particle blasting: The presented method works with a dry gas mixture, a small dry ice component, low operating pressure, and simultaneous suction. The cleaning effect is mainly achieved through the strong expansion of the gas. This allows even sensitive areas such as PLC assemblies or frequency converters to be reached without using chemicals, moisture, or highly abrasive particle blasting. Under defined conditions, cleaning under voltage is even possible.
• Success must be proven through KPIs: Cooling performance, thermographic before-and-after comparisons, failure costs, and component consumption were mentioned as metrics. In five long-term evaluated customer projects, the observed failure costs were reduced by about half according to the provider. In a particularly stressed application case, the number of replaced frequency converters decreased from 73 to three per year. At the same time, it was emphasized that such results always depend on the respective production conditions.

Classification: From individual cleaning to data-based maintenance strategy

This episode fits perfectly with the Hahn-PRO strategy because it shows: A technical measure only unfolds its full value when condition, execution, result, and experiential knowledge are permanently linked.

• Cleaning measures remain isolated individual events: In many companies, before-and-after pictures, thermography reports, service provider protocols, and failure information exist in separate folders or systems. As a result, it is hardly traceable later when a system was cleaned, why the measure was necessary, and what effect it actually had. With ADAM, we bundle this information in a Digital Lifecycle Record. Photos, measurements, orders, test reports, and feedback are directly assigned to the respective control cabinet, cooler, or frequency converter. This turns a one-time service into a traceable part of the maintenance strategy.
• The economic effect is difficult to prove: The episode shows how important comparisons between temperature, energy consumption, failures, and cleaning intervals are. In practice, however, this information is often found in different data silos and under inconsistent names. ADAM creates Operational Intelligence here. Our Brownfield-native platform connects existing data without companies having to clean up their entire master data landscape beforehand. Through hybrid search and system-related contexts, previous measures, similar error patterns, and relevant measurement data can be found again even in the existing data chaos.
• Practical knowledge and safety requirements are lost: Whether cleaning is allowed under voltage, which contamination is critical, when a shutdown becomes necessary, or what boundary conditions apply in the Ex area, depends heavily on the experiential knowledge of individual specialists. With mobile workflows, voice-based feedback, and no-code processes, we document this knowledge immediately during work. Technicians can easily speak observations, safety conditions, and results. ADAM structures the information and makes it available for the next planning – auditable, system-related, and without additional paperwork.

Conclusion: Preventive cleaning increases system availability – ADAM turns a single measure into a measurable, repeatable, and continuously learning maintenance process.