Directly compressible hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) to support continuous manufacturing

Abstract

This work was undertaken to evaluate a novel hydroxypropyl methylcellulose excipient used in the manufacture of hydrophilic matrix tablets for oral controlled release. This material was coprocessed with a small amount of silicon dioxide to provide improvements over the standard material and was shown to have better flow, compactability and less triboelectric charging demonstrating an improved performance in a loss-in-weight feeder. As a result, this material is preferred for use in continuous manufacturing via direct compression which would be problematic for the standard grade. Finally, a methodology was developed to calibrate the material properties for a computer simulation of the loss-in-weight feeder using the discrete element method which was shown to have good correlation with the experimental results.