Kemutec Supplies Cone Mills To AstraZeneca

Kemutec Group is delighted to have supplied Kek cone type size reduction mill systems to AstraZeneca for several of their recently built tablet production facilities in the UK, Mainland Europe, and further afield.

Tablet manufacture is based around the wet granulation process performed in mixer granulators. The wet granulated material is conventionally dried in fluid bed dryers. Linking the granulator to the dryer allows direct transfer from one machine to the other. The drying process is much more efficient and easier to control if the wet granule feed has a consistent and narrow particle size distribution. Even though the particle size distribution is narrow, it is purposely kept fairly coarse to maintain fluidisation efficiency. It is for this purpose that KEK Cone Mills are sited between the granulator and the fluid bed dryer to size the mixture during transfer to the dryer. Because of the innate minimal product dwell time in the KEK Cone Mills, their presence in-line has little impact on the transfer time but a big impact on drying efficiency.