Glatt Technology Center: Service from Feasibility Study to Production Plant

Innovation - Glatt's Technology Center in Weimar stands for innovative technologies for the production of granules and pellets from powders and/or solid-containing liquids.

In the last 12 months alone, more than 120 customers from 17 countries used the company's advanced equipment to develop new product forms by feasibility studies or to optimize the properties of already established products for their production processes. Apparatuses and plants of different sizes are available for such studies - from a laboratory via a pilot up to a production scale.

Glatt Ingenieurtechnik, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, sees itself as a full-service provider a partner for its customers from project initiation, development, implementation, commissioning up to the process engineering and technical service in a cross-sector and competent manner. Already established in 1991, the Weimar Technology Center was vastly extended and future-oriented equipped with advanced systems in 2009. After one year of successful operation under the new conditions, all expectations were exceeded.

At the heart of all process engineering activities are fluid and spouted bed technologies for the production of innovative products for all powder processing industries. The focus is on continuous processes, but also batch processes are offered. Engineers from Weimar were always one step ahead when it comes to the processing of powdery substances into attractive, dust-free, easy dosage and easily soluble granules and agglomerates for food, detergents, fertilizers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and many other applications.

Its combination from process diversity and advanced apparatuses has long since made the Glatt competence center to be an internationally recognized hub for the above processes and the schedule for application tests is booked up months in advance.

The equipment of Glatt's Weimar Technology Center ranges from latest fluid bed and spouted bed plants up to complementary apparatuses such as high-shear granulators, extruders, pelletizers and tablet presses. A certification as per ISO 2010:9001 and an established HACCP system for the contract manufacturing unit underline Glatt's quality standards.

The laboratory, which was also upgraded, uses a great variety of devices for the determination of product properties including digital microscopy, particle size and shape distribution (laser diffraction), thermoanalysis (TGA, DSC), sorption and desorption, abrasion, bulk density, humidity as well as fluid properties such as particle size or droplet distribution in suspensions or emulsions, fluid rheology, pH value and conductance.

Moreover, the Weimar technology site is networked with many renowned scientific institutions such as universities, colleges and research institutes at home and abroad. This is the basis for ongoing improvements. Glatt Ingenieurtechnik presently owns about 100 process and apparatus patents all over the world.