Brian Vernet

The proper proportioning of pharmaceutical ingredients is critical to the overall blended product quality and subsequent efficacy of the drug compound. Therefore, the accuracies of the feed and subsequent continuous refill technologies are critical. Typically, Coperion K-Tron Twin Screw Pharmaceutical Design Loss-in-Weight (LIW) feeders in conjunction with Coperion K-Tron P-Series vacuum receivers are used for this purpose.

The application of continuous extrusion via twin screw extruders (TSE) for pharmaceutical solid dosage form production is growing in popularity as a preferred option to more traditional granulation techniques. The TSE offers several advantages as a method of granulation formation including continuous processing with reproducibility and combination of a variety of process steps within one piece of equipment, i.e. distributive and dispersive mixing, granulating and devolatilization. The production method provides gentle product handling at short residence time and low temperature. Two methods in which the extruder is used for solid dosage form production are wet granulation and hot melt extrusion.

Conical Screen Mills (also referred to as Cone Mills) are gentle size reduction mills which are often used to precondition the material prior to its entry into a process, either by delumping or coarse size reduction. These mills utilize a rotating propeller/stationary screen combination to gently compress material against the screen wall and size the material accordingly. Vacuum conveying is often used to move material through the conical screen mill, help improve overall throughput of the process, contain dust or exposure, and also to assist in improvement of end product quality.