Choosing the wrong clamp can have serious repercussions, with leaks potentially leading to line shutdown, contamination, and wasted process material. So how do you choose the right clamp for your application?

Beyond basic questions of size and configuration we believe the single biggest consideration should be quality. Even the best clamps in the world fail, so it’s really a matter of deciding what level of risk you’re prepared to accept. Some factors to consider include:

• How sensitive your line/process is to contamination
• Staff time that would be lost in the event of a clamp failure
• Potential cost of waste process material
• Your expected schedule for clamp maintenance and replacement

For example, if your process material is water, and you have no specific regulatory or process requirement to maintain 100% purity it could be that clamp failure needn’t be a major cost or time sink. In such cases the problem might be restricted to a brief line shutdown while a clamp is being replaced, and a lower quality clamp may be acceptable if the cost of a failure incident is less than the cost of using higher grade clamps.

We specialize in clamps for the pharmaceutical, food and biotech industries where clamp failure can have time and cost consequences far beyond the cost of a few clamps, and as such manufacture clamps using only the best materials and processes, to an industry-leading standard of precision.

A great example of why this makes sense comes from a distributor who had a major US pharamceutical manufacturer come to them with a problem: after amalgamating process equipment from two different factories they found small mis-matches in clamped connection points where two slightly different types of ferrules were being used.

Once the inevitable leaks were noticed the process had been running for some time, and with no way to prove the end result could meet the FDA’s extremely stringent standards on contamination batches of very costly product had to be destroyed.

They were challenged to “torture test” a variety of clamps to find any that could cope with the idiosyncrasies of this manufacturers equipment. Of six clamps tested the ACL sanitary clamp was the only one not to result in leaks, and was subsequently chosen for use.

The deciding factor here was our clamps unique Omega profile, which is so efficient it can sometimes even overcome problems like mismatched ferrules that would be impossible for any other clamp. This combined with it’s high precision assembly and raw materials make our high quality clamps stand out if your process simply cannot afford to have leaks.

Some processes don’t require this level of quality, but if yours does please contact us today to find out how we can help.