Photonics for future chemical sensing

Tablet press feed frame

Direct compression after blending and lubrication has been the mainstay of Solid Oral Dosage Form pharmaceutical manufacturing for over 100 years. Until now the only way to verify content uniformity and assay in the tablet has to been to take a very small sample and perform laboratory testing for quality control purposes. This is an expensive, slow and laborious process that results in a large amount of very high value material being held in inventory awaiting QC release for final processing steps. Well known issues such as blend segregation that cause sub or super potent material to be produced during the tabletting run can be very difficult to detect and assess using these traditional QC tools. At-line PAT solutions have proven to be expensive and difficult to implement. Recent advances in inline PAT measurement systems such as the miniaturisation of measurement technology in the Sentronic DRLS measurement head has meant that is now possible to continuously monitoring tablet die filling blend potency and uniformity through out the entire tabletting production run. This is a cost effective way to ensure production consistency and quality and significant enabler of Real Time Release Testing.