Pharmaceutical Water Quality

The United States Pharmacopeia ( USP) sets standards for the quality of water used in pharmaceutical applications.  These fall under two different classifications:

USP Purified Water (PW) is used for applications such as tablet, ointment, medical device manufacturing, and topically applied cosmetics. 

USP Water for Injection (WFI), which as the name implies, is water designed to be injected into a patient or a pharmaceutical product where endotoxin limits need to be below 0.25 EU/ml.

Both of these water qualities can be produced by appropriate pretreatment to incoming feed waters, followed by reverse osmosis, de-ionization, particle filtration or by distillation.  The choice of PW or WFI as the desired water quality will drive the specific design of the system.