Working together to solve a feeding problem A college
engineering department solves a pharmaceutical company's
material-feeding problem. Pfizer Inc., headquartered in New
York, produces human and animal prescription medicines for
national and international markets. One of the company's global
research and development centers, located in Ann Arbor, Mich.,
operates a pharmaceutical sciences pilot plant in nearby
Holland, Mich., that produces preproduction quantities of
various products for testing before full-scale production at
other facilities. The pilot plant was experiencing an ongoing
problem manually feeding a range of solid materials into
various-sized inerted reaction vessels that contained a solvent.
To solve this problem, the company collaborated with a nearby
college and funded a senior-level engineering student R& D
project in which the students designed and built a custom-
engineered feeding system to accurately feed the solid materials
into the solvent-containing, inerted reaction vessels at varyin