Granular details: L.B Bohle enhances service centre
L.B. Bohle recently made some major enhancements to its service centre. EPM learns more…
A complete pharmaceutical production line is available at the group’s service centre in Ennigerloh, Germany, to develop and test machines and processes. This makes it possible to work under actual conditions at pilot plant scale. Various measuring, test and analysis equipment supplements the production line.
New to the centre is the BFC TriPan, which can be operated with three pans. “As part of the test runs in the Service Centre, numerous customers have already expressed great satisfaction with the quality and productivity of our machines,” said CEO Lorenz Bohle. “Reliable tests with a focus on our customers’ needs is the best recipe for success,” Bohle continued.
The BFC TriPan can be operated with three pans for batch sizes of seven to 75 litres. The coater drums can be changed in less than 30 minutes.
“The innovations of the BFC TriPan primarily concern the design. The nozzle arm was expanded to six nozzles in total,” said Andreas Altmeyer, head of the service centre. The nozzles themselves are fed independently (three peristaltic pump double heads for six nozzles) so that spray products that are difficult to process (e.g. methylacrylate) can be sprayed securely with every nozzle. Moreover, the angle of the spray nozzle and the distance between the spray nozzles and the tablet bed can be set automatically as a recipe parameter. When a trial is started, these important recipe parameters can be optimised without manual intervention. The infrared product temperature sensor was also incorporated as a fixed component. It continuously measures the core bed temperature in addition to the supply and exhaust air temperature.
The BFS 30 Bohle Uni Cone BUC, which has also been installed at the service centre, was extended by the GMA 70 high-shear granulator to form a system with a compact footprint. Therefore, all classic wet granulation processes are now available for test runs with state-of-the-art technology at the service centre. L.B. Bohle sees great potential in the fluid bed technology in particular. The Bohle Uni Cone BUC process, which was presented at Interpack back in 2014, offers numerous advantages compared to the conventional Wurster process.
According to Andreas Altmeyer, head of the service centre: “Fluid bed systems are state of the art and offer various benefits. Compared to the classic top spray process, granulation/drying and pellet coating are performed in one system without requiring any changes or additional inserts. Several patents have been achieved with the system.”
Thanks to constant cooperation with universities or as part of customer trials, process analytical technologies (PAT) such as the Parsum probe for online particle size measurement or NIR/MW humidity sensors are used at the service centre as well. This ensures an optimum process flow for agglomeration by agitation or pellet coating (prevention of pellet agglomeration).