Characterization Of Spray Guns For The Tablet Coating Industry
•White Paper: Characterization of Spray Guns for the Tablet Coating Industry
Automated spray guns are widely used in fully integrated pan-coating systems. Such pan-coating systems are used by the pharmaceutical/food industries to apply aqueous film, solvent and sugar coating for tablets, confectioneries, and a variety of other products.
Typically, pan-coating systems are supplied from the equipment manufacturer fully configured for a desired application. The end user commonly makes necessary changes to the spray gun arrangement in order to accommodate a new application or a change in the coating formulation. Often, these changes do not produce the expected results due to a less than optimal spray gun configuration. Frequently an operator will change the gun operating conditions by simply varying the fluid and gas feeds. As a result, the spray pattern may deteriorate and drop size may increase beyond the desired size thus affecting the final product quality.
A standard method for optimizing spray guns used in tablet coating applications does not exist at present. This paper proposes a method that includes an analysis of the critical elements of atomizer testing, consisting of layout and overlap optimization to reduce the errors commonly associated with spray manifold application, such as uneven spray distribution, heavy edges and poor overlap. Furthermore, this approach will also consider the effects of "normal" operating parameters such as fluid flow rate, atomization pressure and gun-to-target distance on spray-pattern uniformity, drop size, and velocity.
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•White Paper: Characterization of Spray Guns for the Tablet Coating Industry