Applying Back Pressure Regulators for Flow Control

The back pressure regulators in the Equilibar FD Series are obviously well suited for the control of process pressure, but we also often implement these instruments for mass flow control – we do this with the FD Series, but also with all other Equilibar BPR product lines.

Precision Dosing through Flow Control

Equilibar back pressure regulators facilitate the user to control the process flow with high accuracy and stability, resulting in very precise dosing. In pharmaceutical applications – but also in applications in the food and beverage, (bio)tech or sanitary industry – this is often of critical importance.

Application Example from the Pharmaceutical Industry

A customer in the pharmaceutical industry challenged us to design a solution for a dosing application, that would require high-precision-dosing of an unusually complex medium across an unusually long run-time. Although we committed to the customer to keep their application details strictly confidential, we can share the results of the test set-up that we built in preparation of this project.

Set-Up of this innovative pharmaceutical mass flow controller

The set-up in this video – also visible in the picture on this page – consists of several items:

The gas bottle supplies the pressure for the process medium and for the dome pressure of our Equilibar valve. The Model 10 forward pressure reducing regulator  reduces the supplied pilot pressure from the gas bottle. The tank contains the process medium. In this case, the process medium was a mixture of Glycerol and water.

A Coriolis sensor from Endress + Hauser is placed behind the tank and behind the flow sensor is the Equilibar FDO4 control valve. The pressure on this Equilibar valve is controlled with an ERC Series Electronic Reference Pressure Controller designed and built by PCS, with a flow restrictor and a proportional valve. The ERC gets its signal from the PID controller.

Behind the valve, we simulated 200 mbar(g) again with the use of an Equilibar valve and our new and innovative EQ-DA diaphragm actuator (EQ-DA). Interested to learn more about that? It will be launched shortly at the ACHEMA 2022!

Test Results and Demonstration Video

Greta Greving – account manager with Pressure Control Solutions for the German-speaking markets – demonstrates this test set-up containing an Equilibar back pressure regulator from the FD-Series and a Coriolis flow sensor from Endress+Hauser.

The glycerol dosing using our test set-up was very stable and very accurate – convince yourself and check out the video below!

Are you also interested in dosing or other controlling other processes for applications in the food and beverage, (bio)pharma, or sanitary industries, please contact us!

You can read more about our expertise in Flow Control in our flow control expertise section.