Public safety is paramount whenever anything is produced for public consumption. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that food-borne illness costs the United States more than $15.6 billion each year in lost productivity and medical care. And from a manufacturing standpoint, the costs from product recalls or contamination outbreaks in production facilities include reputational damage, compliance penalties and sales declines that can linger for years.
These high costs have led to strict product purity laws and regulations for virtually every step in the production process right down to the gauges used for pressure measurement and monitoring.
Pressure measurement plays an important role in the chain of processes within any plant, but for applications in food, pharmaceutical and biotech industries, process equipment is required to function accurately in particularly brutal environments. Sanitary gauges are designed to tolerate high vibration, wide temperature and humidity ranges, and harsh cleaning chemicals and they’re designed with special materials and features that prevent bacterial growth or contamination. They are required wherever exceptionally high standards of sanitation and washdown conditions must be met.
Conditions in food or pharmaceutical processing environments differ dramatically from plant to plant. When searching for a sanitary gauge for a particular application, there are several important factors to consider.
There are a number of different sanitary gauges available that comply with federal regulations and food code laws, and our LC20 Diaphragm Pressure Gauge is right up there with the best of them. Manufacturing facilities that use homogenizers, separators and heat exchangers put a lot of stress on the equipment, but the LC20 is engineered to maintain impressive ±0.1% full scale accuracy in even the most abusive environment. With an IP67 rating, an ultra smooth diaphragm surface, and 3-A certified sanitary trip-clamp seals that perform consistently in both CIP and SIP environments, the LC20 is a great option for applications in the food & beverage, pharmaceutical and biotech industries.