Modelling of tablet motion in film coating process: towards process scalability

Developing a DEM model to improve process understanding of the tablet film coating process.
Although tablets are the preferred oral solid dosage form in the pharmaceutical industry, the process that creates film-coated tablets is still far from being fully understood. The film coating stage of tablet manufacturing is a major step in the production process, as it can improve both the mechanical and the physiochemical stability of the final product. However, understanding of the process is limited due to the considerable number of variables that play a role.
The main phenomena happening in the film coating process are tablet dynamics, spraying and drying and all three can affect coting quality and can interact with each other. This makes the process difficult to scale-up as well as difficult to predict the coating quality at the end of the process. The result is that a lot of effort and investment is required to design, optimize, and scale the process from lab to commercial manufacturing, which relies mostly on experimental investigation at the time being. If the process can be better understood and predicted, then both the investment and the consumption of resources would be significatively reduced.
Developing a Discrete Element Method (DEM) model to predict the effects of process parameters on tablet dynamics and coating quality is part of the project conducted from the EngD student Gaia Basile with Janssen Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson. The project aims to improve process understanding of tablet motion in the film coating process, as well as characterization of tablet friction coefficients and the resulting impact on tablet motion. The findings of the project will help Janssen Pharmaceutica in guiding the film coating process scale-up from pilot- to commercial-scale.