Prof. Alberto M. Cuitiño

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Rutgers University
NSF-ERC for Structured Organic Particulate Systems

Multi-component mixtures are common practice in the pharmaceutical industry and the prediction of their mechano-chemical properties is critical for tailoring product performance and for optimizing process parameters. Specifically, product performance can be tailored by introducing heterogeneities at two different length scales: i) at the granular scale, by mixing powders with different mechano-chemical properties (e.g., API and multiple excipients), ii) at the tablet scale, by generating well-defined geometric patterns of powders with different properties (e.g., multi-layers and multi-core tablets). Since these heterogeneous systems do not follow linear mixing rules in general, we adopt a modelling approach that individually describes each particle in the powder bed and therefore allows for predicting the microstructure evolution during the compaction process. In turn, compression pressure, bonding area and tensile strength are macroscopic predictions of the model for a given initial powder bed and final tablet solid fraction (or relative density). In this Seminar we describe the modelling approach and showcase its potential as an effective design tool by exploring different mixtures and geometric configurations.