Feb 9 2011
Advanced Diamond Technologies (ADT) announces that Merck-Millipore has selected UNCD® Bearings™ to improve the reliability and dry-running capability of its NovAseptic® line of mixers.
NovAseptic mixers are widely used in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries by customers who require aseptic mixing processes for the manufacture of pharmaceutical and food-grade chemicals.
UNCD Bearings
Upon loss of lubrication, a mixer’s bearings commonly fail within 30 seconds. When this occurs, they must be repaired, cleaned, and re-certified; a cumbersome and expensive process. UNCD Bearings extend the reliability of the magnetically-coupled mixing heads in NovAseptic mixers because UNCD, a thin-film form of nanocrystalline diamond, is bonded to the bearing surface. Because UNCD has the durability of diamond, the world’s hardest material, and a coefficient of friction similar to Teflon®, tests show that UNCD Bearings can extend the mean-time-to-failure upon loss of lubrication to over 5 hours—an improvement of 600 times.
UNCD Bearings are part of ADT’s award-winning UNCD Components™ product family which includes faces for mechanical seals for fluid pumping applications. UNCD is certified as USP Class VI compliant—an internationally accepted benchmark for material compatibility in biomedical and pharmaceutical applications.
“We looked all over the world for a material both durable and smooth enough to extend the reliability of the bearings used in NovAseptic’s mixers without risking the introduction of contaminants into the process. With UNCD Bearings our customers can avoid the costly and irritating unplanned maintenance that occurs when the bearings lose lubrication. This translates directly into increased uptime and greater product throughput which has a direct bottom-line benefit for our customers,” said NovAseptic’s product manager, Tom Dennen.
“UNCD’s amazing properties benefit end-users who are concerned about friction and wear. Supplying the complete bearings to Millipore validates ADT’s business model as a producer of high-value products uniquely enabled by or improved with diamond,” said ADT’s president Neil Kane.
UNCD Bearings are immediately available from Merck-Millipore and can be fitted to existing NovAseptic mixers.