[learn_more caption=”Göran Alderborn”] Biography: Prof. Göran Alderborn has a PhD in Pharmaceutics from 1985 and joined the Department of Pharmacy at Uppsala University in 1987 as a lecturer in Pharmaceutics. He has held the chair in Pharmaceutical Technology at the same university since 1998. His particular field of research interest is in the technology and materials science of solid dosage forms with a special focus on tablet technology. Current research projects centers on: (i) Analytical powder compression; (ii) Structure – property relationships for granular and particular solids; (iii) Solid state amorphization during mechanical treatment of powders; (iv) Packing and flow of adhesive mixtures. He has published about 100 papers and contributed to several international text books within the pharmaceutics discipline. Prof. Alderborn has been the chairman of the Department of Pharmacy at Uppsala University for several years and is since 2011 the Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the same university. He is a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Sweden Department of Pharmacy, Uppsala University, Box 580, SE-751 23 Uppsala, Sweden; E-mail:goran.alderborn@farmaci.uu.se[/learn_more]

Abstract: Powder compaction is used to manufacture diverse types of products, including medicines, and powder compaction is hence one of the most important operations in the manufacturing of solid products. As a consequence, a series of equations relating the pressure required to achieve a given compression state (compact volume) have been developed. The constants (or compression parameters) of such global compression equations carry information about the powder and have been used as a means to characterize properties of the single particles of the powder. Thus, powder compression has also emerged to a method of analysis of particle mechanics. In this context, powder compression represents an attractive approach due to its experimental and statistical convenience and may represent a feasible analytical tool to characterize particle mechanics in the evaluation of strategies to engineer particles for improved functionality. Analytical powder compression is however also criticized from different aspects, such as the fact that derived compression parameters are affected by variations in experimental and data treatment procedures. A parallel research field to analytical powder compression is the modeling of the compression process. Compression modeling provides information of the precise role of particle mechanics for the compression process and supports thus the relevance in using powder compression as a method of assessing particle properties. The derivation of a compression parameter is typically based on the conception of a stage-by-stage compression process with a defined process that controls the rate of compression of each stage. As a means to facilitate and standardize the use of powder compression as an analytical tool, we have developed a protocol for compression analysis of dense particles. It is based on the use of compression parameters from global compression equations and enables the description of powders in terms of the stages that are expressed during powder compression. Central in the protocol is the classification of particles as rearranging and non-rearranging, as brittle or ductile and in terms of deformability on a scale of particle plasticity. We intend to further develop this protocol to enable the measurement of particle elasticity and to handle the special problem of the analysis of dense vs porous particles. A major future challenge is to use compression parameters to predict compactibility of powders.