From the old idea of the Brittle Fracture Index (BFI), to fracture mechanics tests on pharmaceutical tablets we have gone a long way in terms of experimental capabilities to characterize the resistance of tablets to fracture but practical tests and a clear correlation of its results with fundamental properties of the compacts are still part of the common practice.  By combining some old ideas, numerical simulation and considerations of the distributed nature of failure in pharmaceutical compacts, we proposal a set of simple experiments and associated analysis that tease out both the fracture toughness of the compact and the length scale of the microstructure of the tablet.  In addition to discussing the fundamentals we also provide some guidance for the practical dimension selection and execution of the experiments. Contributions to this work were made by Ed Young, Wright Joseph, Bui Phuong, and Jovana Radojevic.

Phuong Bui and Antonios Zavaliangos
On the detection and prediction of compaction induced phase transformations in tableting

James Thomas, Phuong Bui, Owen Flood and Antonios Zavaliangos
Extreme material sparing techniques for the detection of sticking

Joseph Wright and Antonios Zavaliangos
Air entrapment in tableting

David Frieberg and Antonios Zavaliangos
Numerical simulation of sticking and implications for the testing for sticking propencity.