This morning, I had the honor of visiting our new pharmaceutical factory. Xinghu Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. is the most powerful pharmaceutical factory in our city. It mainly extracts the effective components of traditional Chinese medicine and then makes medicine. The most famous product is compound baicalin tablets. Xinghu Pharmaceutical's compound Scutellaria baicalensis tablets are essential medicines for our home travel. Whenever I feel angry or have a sore throat, I take a few pills and cure the disease immediately, hehe. Today, with excitement and curiosity, I visited the production workshop, boiling medicine extraction workshop and laboratory under the leadership of a beautiful minister sister.
The first is the production workshop. After we entered the gate, we saw a whole row of lockers with names written on them. The minister's sister said that every staff member has slippers to prevent people from bringing in bacteria from the outside. She took out her keys, put on her slippers and gave me two shoe covers to put on before taking me upstairs.
Let's go to the third floor first. This floor is for the production of capsules. The first thing I saw was the first dressing room. She took me in and gave me a sterilized suit to wear. She also took out her clean clothes in the dressing room. But it's also in order, hat, coat, trousers, mask, hehe, so that only the eyes are exposed. Then I opened another door and went to the second dressing room, where I washed my hands with cleaning solution, dried them and prepared to enter the production line. When I come here, I can't help but sigh: the requirements for hygiene in the pharmaceutical factory workshop are really strict, no less than the operating room of the hospital! Then, I visited every studio in the process of making capsules. Each studio has several doors communicating with others, and the rooms are separated by glass. Each process has a fine division of labor, and most of the production is mechanized. What impressed me most was the capsule filling machine, because it happened to be running during the visit: while emptying capsules and putting materials into the hopper, the machine will automatically fill capsules and eject them, or it can eject unfilled capsules and unqualified empty capsules from another exit. There are many transparent plastic bags next to them, which contain finished capsules. I have seen so many capsules for the first time in my life!
Let's go to the second floor. This floor is used to produce pills. It is similar to the layout of the third floor, and it is also the first to enter the first and second dressing rooms. The composition of the studio is similar to that of the third floor, but there are more studios for granulating and tabletting. The machines used are different from those on the third floor. What impressed me the most were two kinds of automatic packaging machines, hehe, they were also running at that time. The first packaging machine has a large hopper for placing the produced tablets and a horizontal conveyor belt for transporting plastic bottles. This machine can count specific tablets and put them into bottles, and automatically tighten the caps and label them. The second packaging machine is used to package tablets into blister type and produce non-toxic aluminum foil at the same time. At the same time, the blister is manually filled into tablets, then the two are obliquely embedded, and then sealed by high temperature cylinder.
Then, the minister's sister showed me around the decocting workshop. The space here is much wider, and it is no longer divided into countless studios, but a whole floor of huge musical instruments connected together. Boiling medicine, extraction, solvent recovery, evaporation, pulping and extraction are all instrument integration. The instruments here are all stainless steel, so we can't see how they work. Some of them can only see the tumbling liquid medicine through the small window on the instrument.
Finally, I also asked to visit the laboratory. However, it is similar to the analytical chemistry laboratory in our school, with instrument room, laboratory, reagent room, specimen room and culture room. The high-end instruments used are nothing more than HPLC, UV instrument, melting point instrument, acidity meter and so on. There happened to be staff doing column chromatography when I went, and I was eager to try, hehe. But the post he used was too small. How efficient is the column? Ha ha.
After visiting the pharmaceutical factory, I benefited a lot, knowing what the real pharmaceutical production is like, the knowledge I learned from books is concrete and intuitive, and I also personally experienced the strict hygiene requirements of the pharmaceutical factory workshop and the strict working attitude of the staff. They don't talk much, but they are quite cautious.