Utilização de um fluxômetro coriolis como parâmetro no processo de revestimento de comprimidos em uma indústria farmacêutica

Abstract

Medicines are highly consumed products by the population. The pharmaceutical sector grows every year and solid dosage forms represent about 95% of the drugs marketed worldwide, with pills responsible for 83.8% of the medicine sold. Given the large consumption of medicines, it becomes necessary for the pharmaceutical industries to optimize their processes. Film coating is the most used technique for coating pills, it is a sensitive process becames necessary to have correct control of the flow rate of the applied coating dispersion. The Coriolis flowmeter is a promising device for carrying out this control. The objective of this researche is to implement a mass flow rate as a new process parameter for the film coating, of a given pill, through the use of a Coriolis flowmeter, also performing the characterization of the coating dispersion and the flow regime in order to optimize the process, ensuring the quality of the medicine. The coating system used belongs to a pharmaceutical industry located in the Industrial Pole of Manaus. With the studies the fluid was characterized as Newtonian and the flow established in the process was laminar for velocities used. The Coriolis flowmeter enabled the implementation of the mass flow rate as a process parameter, making it possible to have a better control of the amount of dispersion sprayed on the pills and this proved to be effective for optimizing the process, providing a time reduction of approximately 2 hours.