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Capsule and tablet scales play an important role in the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, packaging precise doses for delivery to patients in need.
At PACK EXPO 2022, Work Microwave, a German developer and manufacturer of RF electronics technologies and products, showcased its WORKsens FT-96 Pharmaceuticals Weighing Sensor.
The sensor is based on the microwave resonance method and is small enough to be integrated directly into the filling machine to characterize the weight of capsules and tablets in continuous production systems.
With traditional check scales, there is a limit to how fast products can move through machines. As product manager Lukas Lischke explained at the show, conventional load cells on pharmaceutical scales require individual tablets or capsules to stand still for a short period of time for accurate measurement. Gravity-based systems are also sensitive to vibration, so checkweighers must be heavy machines (typically ~1,000 kg) that can withstand vibration on busy production floors. Most operations also require multiple load cells to achieve the liquidity required by pharmaceutical companies.
With the WORKsens FT-96, tablets or capsules flow through a 12 mm outer diameter channel tube and are continuously measured at up to 15 capsules per second. The units are compact so they can be stacked for parallel operation.
“Because it’s based on RF microwave detection, the capsules can drop freely—you don’t need the downtime or the square meter footprint that traditional scales require,” Lischke said. “It can, for example, be directly integrated into another company’s filling machine, creating a closed loop without large distances. If 500 capsules pass through the interval before a fault such as a clogged nozzle is detected, discard everything in between. Your cycle is faster here because your distance is much shorter.”
More information in the video: Measuring the weight of a high-speed capsule and a tablet in flight
In a statement from the company, “The data collection platform mounted on the sensor head continuously monitors the resonator head for changes in product properties. This allows the sensor to detect whether pharmaceutical tablets are intact or defective, and has the ability to reject under- or overfilled capsules or cracked tablets.
The sensor must be calibrated for each capsule. For a CMO or brand owner who runs different tablets, they calibrate the system before launching a new product. After each initial calibration, no recalibration is required for product changes.
Potential applications
The WORKsens FT-96 PACK was a finalist in the Personal Care/Pharma category of the EXPO International 2022 Technology Excellence Awards. The sensor has the ability to be compatible with new digital industry 4.0 concepts and has the potential for continuous production of pharmaceutical products, not only for its speed, but as a sensor that can help companies realistically identify process drift or product problems. the time.
The sensor has a number of potential applications for weighing small products that require non-conductive precision. Although the demonstration was for oral solid-dose drugs, Lischke said the technology could also be applied to syringe and vial filling systems.
“We can build the resonator as a wheel armature and you can control the filling process from the empty bottle to the correct filling weight,” said Thomas Wiesner, regional sales director.
As drugs become more potent and smaller in size, companies must maintain filling accuracy to meet regulatory requirements and ensure patient safety. “There are some applications that have a very, very small amount of padding. Sometimes the fill weight is less than the single-dose vial tolerance. In this situation, you cannot measure it with a normal scale. But this system can detect low weights because you only measure the difference between an empty and a filled single-dose vial,” Wisner explained.
“Sometimes you have droplet measurements—if you want to add a certain amount of droplets. You can let those droplets fall through the resonator and measure the size of each droplet that falls,” Lischke added.
Next steps
WORK Microwave is currently looking for beta testers as the system is not yet GMP or FDA compliant. So, even if a company cannot use it at the end of the line for compliance, verification and record keeping, it can be used as a feedback system in the filling line to close the loop faster. “You still need a conventional checkweighing system at the end of the line because the FT-96 is not yet up to par. We are currently looking for partners to run our system in parallel with conventional load cells, which will demonstrate that we are as accurate or more accurate than conventional load cells for each type of product,” Lischke said.
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