A Maryland-based manufacturer of fluorescent antibody conjugate proteins, faced a significant production bottleneck in their chromatography operations. Their conjugate dyes are optically dense at process concentrations, requiring dilution before spectroscopic analysis. This meant operators had to continuously pull manual samples from each effluent stream, perform dilutions at the bench, acquire spectra on a standalone instrument, and interpret results from a spreadsheet — repeatedly, across multiple columns, throughout every production run.

BME Systems designed and deployed a modular inline monitoring system that eliminated the manual sampling process entirely. Automated dilution of the continuous effluent stream feeds a fiber-coupled photodiode array spectrometer driven by a dedicated ARM processor, capturing a full absorbance spectrum every several seconds. Data is transmitted wirelessly and stored to an industry-standard SQL database with a normalized architecture designed for long-term analysis and future machine learning applications.

A connected Ignition SCADA platform (Inductive Automation) analyzes each incoming spectrum in real time, calculating concentration and wavelength ratios in under ten milliseconds. The system monitors multiple chromatography columns simultaneously and is capable of controlling automated fractionation based on spectral criteria.

This project was funded in part by the Maryland Manufacturing 4.0 Grant Program through the Maryland Department of Commerce.

The result is a production environment where operators monitor the process rather than perform it — with complete spectral records of every run archived automatically for quality and regulatory purposes.