To keep up with rising global demand in the pharmaceutical industry, UConn's Senior Design students paired with Pfizer's Portable Continuous Miniature Modular (PCMM) facility in Groton, CT to analyze and reduce the scheduled manufacturing maintenance, calibration, and care downtime. Using Pfizer's historical preventative maintenance records, the senior design students can assess the efficiency of the existing annual and/or semi-annual maintenance schedule for each piece of equipment. To accurately determine how to modify a maintenance schedule, the team will analyze the health and performance of equipment alongside the measured runtime extracted from Pfizer's database, looking for trends between runtime and recorded wear. Equipment with superfluous maintenance will receive modified maintenance schedules, while equipment that saw significant wear between maintenance will either receive shorter spells between maintenance checks or a reevaluation of lubricants, belts, seals, or bearings. As some equipment will likely have insufficient data to make a decision, these will be reevaluated when there is more data available.

Our team collaborated with Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 1 on this project.