Steps towards numerical verification of the terahertz in-line measurement of tablet mixing by means of discrete element modelling

Abstract

In recent years terahertz in-line sensing has been used to monitor the film coating thickness of individual pharmaceutical tablets during the coating process. In the previous work, the in-line measurements were verified against off-line measurements of samples from the same population. Here we report on our recent progress to further verify the validity of the terahertz in-line measurement modality using discrete element modelling for an artificial lab-scale tablet mixing process inside a tablet pan coater. By coupling discrete modelling with a ray-tracing method it is then possible to estimate the cumulative measurements taken, which in turn can guide towards the fine-tuning of the selection criteria as part of measurement analysis.