News/Articles

 Purpose: Develop a procedure to optimize the required lubricant level for tabletting operations.

Method: Magnesium stearate, a commonly used lubricant to enhance flow and reduce tablet ejection force is also a bad actor. Multistage blending is an accepted practice, adding the lubricant last for a short blend time. Additional blending in paddle feeder systems can continue to over lubricate the product, causing loss of tablet strength and an increase in dissolution times. Too little lubricant will cause wear on ejection cam tracks and tooling heads, tips and dies. An alternate approach is to use less and blend longer, in affect deliberately overcoating the particles but with less available lubricant. If this can be successful, additional blending in the paddle feed system is no longer of concern and the initial blend process is greatly simplified. Using an instrumented tablet press, ejection forces were measured at different lubricant levels and blending times to see if the theory, "use less, blend more" could be applied in practice. Ejection forces were evaluated for varying compaction pressures and turret speeds.

This article dispels some of the misleading industry “wisdom” related to transferring tabletting from one machine to another and outlines the primary factors to consider. It also provides examples of scaling from one press to another using a computer program that eases the task.