GEA is investing in the expansion of its Process Test Center (PTC) at its headquarters for mechanical separation technology in Oelde, Germany. As part of the expansion, a third test room will be added, creating additional capacity for customer pilot tests, internal development projects and testing with larger machines and advanced skid solutions. Once completed, the PTC will cover a total area of 3,500 square meters and support pilot tests with raw material or media input of up to 5,000 litres per hour. The construction project is part of a broader plan to modernise and further develop the PTC, with completion scheduled by the end of 2026.

For many years, the Process Test Center in Oelde has been a central part of GEA’s service offering for the development and application of centrifugal separation technology and looks back on a 70-year history. Customers from a wide range of industries use the facility to analyse product properties, select and design disk stack and decanter centrifuges, and validate separation processes under real-world conditions. To date, more than 60,000 test reports from diverse application areas have been created and archived. This database makes the PTC a long-standing knowledge resource for the design and further development of mechanical separation processes.

Key areas include chemical and pharmaceutical applications; in addition, the facility tests processes based on renewable raw materials as well as applications in beverage and dairy processing. Demand for pilot tests and customised process development has grown steadily in recent years: currently, around 800 product samples are tested and further developed in Oelde each year. With the expansion, GEA is responding to this trend and ensuring that customers will continue to have timely access to test capacity.

Tests at the PTC give customers a reliable basis for planning: Which machine is the right one? Which process parameters deliver the best result? How does the process respond to varying raw material qualities – and which product qualities can be achieved consistently? Detailed product analyses, accurate measurements and centrifuge trials help answer these questions on a test scale and transfer the results to industrial processes.

With the third test room, GEA will gain the flexibility to test new applications faster and advance development projects in a more targeted way. This benefits both customers who need reliable and repeatable results before making an investment and GEA’s internal R&D team, which will have more scope for independent test series in the future. For the pilot tests, a broad spectrum of disk stack and decanter centrifuges is available, with more than 120 test machines ranging from small laboratory units to skid solutions close to industrial scale. The PTC also already has an ATEX-certified test room for use in potentially explosive atmospheres. This infrastructure enables demanding applications in the chemical, oil & gas and related industries.

The new facility is designed for resource-efficient operation from the outset. Plans include a dedicated wastewater treatment system as well as the use of a GEA heat pump – both technologies that GEA also applies in customer projects and is implementing here in its own infrastructure.