GEA ensures safe unit maintenance through LoTo principle for valve technology

Responsibility for process technology and safety

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ranks deficiencies in maintenance safety among the most common causes of accidents in plants. Above all where a number of people are working on one line, it is important to secure the area under maintenance against inadvertent intervention – for example, by means of seals – as the consequences for life and limb can be devastating. “We hear about workplace accidents during maintenance all the time,” explains Lisa Schmidt, Product Sales Manager for hygienic valve technology at GEA. This is avoidable and can easily be prevented with a systematic LoTo approach. Since the solutions currently available were not convincing for GEA valves, the company decided to produce its own package of process technology and LoTo safety systems. Says Schmidt: “We consider it our responsibility to support our customers to the best of our ability when it comes to maintaining their duty of care toward their workforces.”

GEA’s customers – manufacturers in the food and pharmaceutical industries – operate complex plants with long lengths of piping where visibility is often an issue. If, for instance, machines are repaired during ongoing operation, it is important to specifically isolate these working areas from energy sources, i.e. sources of danger. Schmidt reports: “In our case, the danger lies in the media flowing through the pipelines. Specific valves or entire valve clusters can be secured using our LoTo solutions. One Canadian customer recently ordered 1,600 LoTo devices for all their plant’s butterfly valves, while other operators explicitly designate individual valves to eliminate specific potential hazards.”