Powders are widely used in pharmaceutical applications as an excipient or active ingredient in formulations. Consequently, many production processes are dealing with powders: tableting, wet and dry granulation, blending, caps filling, etc. Therefore, any progress in the understanding of powders flowing behavior can have huge consequences for pharmaceutical industries. Indeed, a powder with inappropriate flowing properties can cause serious complications in production lines (clogging, agglomeration, segregation, etc.).
Most pharmaceutical customers refer to Pharmacopeia when it comes to quality control of their production process. To this end, we offer compliant tap density (Granupack) which can comply with almost any standardized tap density test thanks to its unique software.
The angle of repose meets stringent initialization protocol with the Granuheap. The fully automated tester has best in class precision and repeatability results and almost no operator dependency.
TO OPTIMIZE TABLETING PROCESS, GRANUTOOLS OFFERS A WORKFLOW OF TWO INSTRUMENTS: GRANUFLOW FOR DIE FILLING, AND GRANUPACK FOR POWDERS PACKING.
In pharmaceutical industries, it is well-known that the variation in composition and the quality of tablets are determined by material properties and process conditions.
Tablets are manufactured by compressing dry powders or granules in a die. This process consists of three primary stages: die filling, compaction, and ejection. Powders flowability and compressibility during the die filling process controls the tablet composition, the tablet properties as well as homogeneity. Therefore, the study of die filling process parameters has a significant role in controlling the tablet manufacturing industry.
A more recent publication explains the dynamic performance of various excipients through the optifiller of a tableting machine using the GranuDrum. In collaboration with DFE Pharma, Granutools published some results showing the link between the cohesive index of the Super Tab and the mass RSD of the tablets in a rotary press. In this case, we can see below how the behavior at low and high speed will impact the average mass and RSD of the final product.
Reference: On Drug Delivery (2020), Neveu and al.
Inhalers have been developed because of difficulties when using the conventional metered-dose inhaler (MDI). Dry powder inhalers (DPI) in general are easier to use than the MDI and cause fewer irritant effects. Unlike the MDI few patients develop a poor inhalation technique with continued use of DPI.
The inspiratory flow necessary to achieve a therapeutic effect is critical with Dry Powder Inhalers (DPI). Moreover, this technology faces various problems: powder aging, agglomeration induced by electrostatic charges, blend homogeneity during capsule filling, …
Here is an example of the aging effect taking place in a DPI formulation, reference Granutools, Application notes, 2016.
The presence of electrostatic charges inside a powder is known to influence drastically the material flow properties. The triboelectric charges produced at the contacts between the grains and the contacts between the grains and the container produces electrostatic forces. On the one hand, the triboelectric effect is useful for many applications, but on the other hand, the triboelectrification causes complications (powder sticking on pipes surface, agglomeration). Thus, to help industries to quantify this phenomenon GranuTools develops the GranuCharge instrument. It measures automatically and precisely the amount of electrostatic charges created inside a powder during a flow in contact with a selected material.
Electrostatics is becoming more challenging moving from batch to continuous manufacturing due to the charge build-up inside the process line.
Here is an example of agglomeration occurring in the dispensing unit of a continuous manufacturing process and the correlated measurement using the Granucharge
