Tablet coating is an important process step in pharmaceutical production. Coatings can fulfil many functions: Sometimes they serve to protect the product, other times they are used to change the colour or mask taste; sometimes they also facilitate modified drug release. Often different functions are combined.
Process plant for tablet coating production
- Industry:
- Pharmaceutical industry
- End product:
Tablet coating
- Application:
Induction, wetting and dispersion of pigments, fillers and thickeners in ultrapure water
The customer requirements:
- Batch size: 450 L
- Space requirement: 3.3 x 1.6 x 2.7 m
- Degree of automation: Very high
- Powder feed: Direct from the supply container
- Cleanability: Automated
- Fluid addition Automatic
Advantages compared to the previous process
Compared to conventional methods for producing the tablet coatings, the use of ystral Conti-TDS technology in conjunction with a complete system designed by ystral, opens up a wealth of new possibilities. It was possible to perfectly coordinate the Conti-TDS with adjacent processes and drastically reduce process times.
- The system is extremely flexible. All solvent-based and aqueous coating suspensions can be prepared.
- The powder can be inducted either via a induction lance or directly from the container.
- Liquids are inducted directly. Droplet sizes in emulsions prepared in this way are in the nanometre range.
- The service life of the filter installed before the coater increases tenfold.
- Energy consumption has reduced by about 60 % over the previous process.
- Product quality has improved significantly. Suspensions remain homogeneous and stable over the long-term.
- The new process plant allows production time to be reduced by up to 80 %. In certain cases, it was possible to reduce production time from eight hours to just one.
- Storage stability has increased by up to 90 %. This allows a hopper agitator to omitted during the coating process.
- A vacuum is generated in the mixing chamber. The powder is added without dust formation and loss-free.
- The new process plant can also easily process difficult powders that, for example, are difficult to wet, swell spontaneously, foam heavily or clump together.
- Colloidal wetting and dispersion is performed under vacuum. The raw materials are completely de-agglomerated.
- The manufacturing process is 100 % reproducible.
- The cleaning process for the paint preparation container runs automatically, while the next paint suspension is already being prepared in parallel.
- The system is linked to the automatic generation of manipulation-proof electronic logs and documents.
