Will The Tablet Hold Together Until It Reaches The Customer?

By Bob McGregor, General Manager, Brookfield Engineering

R&D selects the active ingredients for a tablet to make sure that it fulfills its primary mission of helping customers overcome a particular ailment.  Qualifying the tablet involves making sure that physical properties, like strength and dissolution rate, are appropriate.  Texture Analyzers have come into prominence providing an array of fixtures and test methods to ensure that tablets behave the way they need to in a physical sense.  These tests ensure that tablets will maintain their integrity from point of manufacture to time of consumption by the customer.  Hardness tests, shear tests, and dissolution tests are becoming the stable of QC Departments to ensure that performance goals are achieved.  Some of the test methods are reviewed in this article.