Hiperbaric

Hiperbaric is the global market leader in high-pressure processing (HPP) industrial equipment. Their machines are used by food manufacturers worldwide to extend product shelf life without heat or preservatives — pressurizing food at up to 6,000 bar to eliminate pathogens while preserving nutritional content. Beyond HPP, Hiperbaric also builds hot isostatic pressing (HIP) machines for materials engineering and hydrogen compression equipment for the energy sector.

The software project involved building the control and monitoring interface that operators use directly on the factory floor and that engineers access remotely for diagnostics and predictive maintenance.

The Problem With Industrial Machines and Software

Industrial machinery at this scale — units that can weigh dozens of tonnes and operate at extreme pressures — cannot tolerate software failures during a production cycle. A crash at the wrong moment isn’t just a software issue; it’s a production halt and potentially a safety incident. This constraint shaped every architectural decision.

What Was Built

The control interface connects to the machine’s PLC (programmable logic controller) layer via an Industrial IoT communication stack. Vue.js drives the operator dashboard: real-time pressure curves, temperature graphs, cycle status, and alarm states rendered reactively as sensor data streams in. The Node.js backend handles the bridge between the PLC data stream and the frontend, normalising sensor readings into structured events and persisting cycle logs to the database.

The monitoring layer allows Hiperbaric’s engineering team to access machine telemetry remotely — diagnostic data, error codes, and cycle history — without direct access to the machine. This supports their global after-sales service model: a machine installed in the USA or Japan can be diagnosed from the headquarters in Burgos.

Technical Decisions

TypeScript throughout: in industrial contexts, type errors caught at compile time are preferable to runtime surprises. Vue.js for the operator interface because it renders predictably and updates reactively without re-rendering the full UI during active cycles — important when operators are watching live pressure curves. The Industrial IoT layer uses OPC-UA protocols where the PLC supports it, with a custom normalisation layer for older machine generations.

The Scale

Hiperbaric machines ship to food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and aerospace materials suppliers across more than 40 countries. The software has to handle different machine configurations, local language requirements, and regulatory logging requirements that vary by region and industry. Food vs. aerospace standards differ significantly, and the logging system has to be configurable per deployment.

Working inside a company with this level of manufacturing precision means the software development cycle has to match that rigour: formal QA processes, documented change logs, and zero tolerance for regressions in safety-critical paths.