Powder Characterisation for Industrial Applications​

Dave:

Okay, now I guess interested in talking about powder technology, I guess, inverted commas, from my understanding, that can be quite wide and a lot of businesses and I guess related technologies and sectors, they do have quite an interest in powder technology.

It's quite amazing when you start to think about the industry as a whole, how wide it is and how impactful and understanding of powder technology can be?

Dave:

Yes I think you touched on it just a few minutes ago, I guess the next important stage for a lot of companies is to meet the regulatory regimes which they are part of clearly there are some particularly you've already mentioned chemicals and pharmaceutical but others as well you see an increase in and sort of people knocking on your door who say “well look we're really a very highly regulated industry there's going to be even more regulation coming down the pipeline can you help us?” is that clearly a growing part of your business?

Jamie:

Yeah I think that we do see some common challenges come up and I touched on a few a moment ago, when we talk about things like pharmaceutical and tableting, but what I find that is most interesting and from our perspective but also challenging from the user's perspective, is that it's impossible to say well what makes a good powder for tableting and what do I need to measure and understand my tableting process that the challenge really of powders is the complexity of them, the variation of the way in which they're handled, the number of different operations they can be subjected to, and the number of different stress and strain conditions they can be subjected to.

So if we have somebody that's making tablets in the UK or in other company making tablets you know in Germany, maybe if they're using slightly different equipment, differences in temperature and humidity in their operating conditions, and different speeds of throughput, that kind of thing any variation in their processes could really change what they require from their powders.

The real challenge with powders is that there's no such thing as a good or bad powder, it doesn't necessarily mean “Oh we've got the most free flowing things so that's going to work best in our powder” it's about finding what's right for your application and again that's really the biggest challenge.

I think that's also part of the education process, there's no such thing as a good or bad powder, there's no single number that quantifies, a good or bad powder there's not even a single technique that necessarily tells you this is a good or bad powder, so people working with powders they do have that challenge, that it's a very complex science and they have to invest that time into understanding them and to optimise in their processes and as you alluded to yourself, the next step then is to take this from the lab to production, where one of the things that becomes really important is in line measurements.

So rather than having to stop probe procedures take samples and check them and then take them to the lab and return back to processing, what people want is real time in line information and again that's something we can offer now with new products that we have in our portfolio and we see applications such as wet granulation, so how do you define a wet granulation process?

How do you determine the end point of a wet granulation process? That's typically something that's a bit of an art form or potentially relies on things like particle size but ultimately that's just one property of a granule, so we see now that these kinds of common challenges across different industries but then different approaches and different solutions required to to address them.

Jamie:

Yeah absolutely. I think it kind of comes back to some of the points I made earlier; that the first thing to understand is really the complexity of powders. 

Powders just aren't inherently good or bad for a process, they don't necessarily fall into very simple categories of free flowing and cohesive and very cohesive for example, and they consist of a bulk assembly of particles, liquids and gases.  

So even just understanding everything about the particles alone, doesn't necessarily tell you everything about how the powder behaves. So when a powder goes into a process it goes in as that bulk assembly, so from our perspective the important thing is to really characterise it as that bulk assembly so as its collection of particles, liquids and gases, but also to subject it to the kind of conditions that will go through in a process, there's little point in generating a whole load of numbers if they're not relevant to your process and that's really the key thing in our approach, that the data we generate is process relevant and in some cases certain parameters we generate maybe more relevant to a particular application, others maybe more relevant to another application, but it's about finding what the parameters are that really dominate your application.

So with the FT4-powder it provides a multivariate approach, so a whole series of different methodologies that subject the powders to different stress conditions, different strain conditions, different flow regimes and measure its response. 

The idea being that it's subjecting the powder to the kind of things that it will go through in process quantifying, how it responds and reacts and therefore providing data that is relevant to a wide range of different applications and the beauty is that all of that capability is contained in one instrument, so rather than having to have a whole series of different instruments that are measuring different things about your powders, you can quantify a whole range of dynamic, bulk and shear properties in one automated instrument. 

So the key of powder characterisation really is as much data as possible but as I say it's really important that data is relevant and that's where our technology comes in.