Foam Granulation part 1

twin screw extruder manufacturer

Due to changing philosophies towards continuous developing, new equipment has been introduced
into pharmaceutical production facilities. The twin-screw extruder is an example of such equipment
for employ in wet granulation. The authors review developments in wet granulation using a twinscrew extruder; lay out the presssing issues with wetting found in this machine; and introduce a
novel approach, foam granulation, that uses the twin-screw extruder to satisfy the unique desires of
granulation fully.
The twin-screw extruder provides highly consistent granulates due to its continuous operation and
closely confined flow path, which requires that particles experience an identical shear history. The
intensive blending of the twin-screw extruder allows lower optimal liquid concentration for
granulation while delivering denser granules for both placebo formulations and highly dosed drugs
compared to a high-shear batch mixer. As a total result, drying and milling operations could be
significantly reduced with usage of this machinery in solid oral-dosage production.
The binding liquid in wet granulation includes a profound influence on product granule properties
and affects the friction between conveyed powders and the barrel wall inside the extruder, which
affects power consumption and the exiting temperature of granules. There are crucial problems to
be solved in regards to presenting liquids into this kind of machinery to acquire rapid and uniform
wetting of excipients so the process exhibits stability in operation, boundaries become instantly
lubricated to lessen equipment wear and granule heating, and top quality granulates are obtained.
A regular variant of extruder useful for granulation may be the intermeshing fully, co-rotating twinscrew extruder. Differences between suppliers are largely in line with the available internal volume
of the machine along with the screw diameter, both of which can drastically affect granulate houses
in both granule size and intragranular porosity. The machine is modular highly, rendering it a
flexible program for continuous manufacturing of different products during its duration of support to
a company. The intermeshing location between the two screws creates a self-wiping action that
minimizes materials accumulation within the machine but also provides a complex flow route for
powders to mix and consolidate. For wet granulation, the die end of the extruder is normally
available to collect granules without extreme consolidation.
Wet granulation in the co-rotating twin-screw extruder is a starve-fed method, and therefore the
available internal level of the machine is by no means completely filled with material during
procedure. This modus operandi is important to extrusion since it minimizes dissipative heat buildup in conveyed drug formulations as it restrictions compression against the barrel wall, it decouples
the parameters of output charge and screw speed to provide formulators considerably more control
over their process, and it more easily enables the downstream addition of materials because the
system isn't pressurized aside from small mixing regions. The zones of the screws which are starved
knowledge dominant drag flow, in which powders will be pushed by the rotating flights of conveyingtype elements downstream. These screw elements have already been found to contribute minor to
granule growth. In fact, screw designs only using conveying elements show very poor distribution of
the binding liquid within exiting solids. It really is rare, however, that a screw design is completely
comprised of conveying components or that the complete amount of the machine is ever fully
starved. Significant granule progress necessitates the inclusion of pressure-driven mixing zones,
which are necessarily completely filled as powders happen to be squeezed through these sections.

Kneading blocks and comb elements are types of mixers commonly used in sparing numbers across
the screw length to produce granule growth along with minor attrition. Keeping these mixing
elements closer to the final end of the extruder reduces attrition.
Powder flow amount is probably the most crucial parameters influencing the degree of granule
development, with larger outputs producing greater granules. The result is brought on by the bigger
volumes of powder that build-up in front of pressure-driven mixing zones as stream rate increases,
producing larger axial compressive forces on the particles present. In fact, it has been revealed that
the dispersion of binder within badly wetted mass can be better for granulation if the screw design
and flow charge are adjusted to supply ideal compressive forces. The affect of flow cost on granule
growth, however, is not seen in smaller extruders or highly starved processes often. Increasing
screw speed has less influence on granule size but generally escalates the number of chopping
events supplied by mixing zones to reduce the occurrence of oversized contaminants. For a fixed
flow rate, increasing the screw speed shall decrease the level of powder that fills the conveying
screw elements, resulting in lower power intake by the process.
Among the published studies for wet granulation, an essential point that's rarely mentioned, yet
widely known to the pharmaceutical industry, is the problems of wetting a formulation in an
extruder uniformly. The problem arises because of the previously mentioned confined space in the
extruder closely, which outcomes in the liquid injection port staying in quick proximity to the powder
move. This confinement prevents atomization of the binder treatment into micro-sized droplets
ahead of contacting the powder solids, as is performed in high-shear batch mixers. Therefore, parts
of the powder turn into oversaturated while some remain virtually dry. This presssing issue was
highlighted in the industrial-oriented document by Shah, who reported procedure surging, though
motor overload events are likewise common. Shah demonstrated several approaches related to
screw design and the sequential addition of more compact liquid quantities in to the process as
methods to minimize surging occurrences. Such alterations greatly increase the complexity of
functioning the extruder and do not eliminate the root cause of the issue. Alternatively, a fresh
solution called foam granulation uses the initial behavior of aqueous foam to cause quick spreading
of the binding liquid over a big area of the powder during wetting.