Case Study

Tablet: Cetirizine 10mg

Problem: Despite the medication being a long-time product of theirs, the customer was experiencing constant issues of sticking, capping, roughness on edges, and low hardness problems. The customer had previously been using coated tooling from a competitor but had very limited success. The product was also very corrosive especially on dies because as they were uncoated and die wear rings had formed requiring them to use the dies upside down. The hardness problem required them to use more force, the sticking and capping issues meant they needed to stop to clean and polish the tooling. Overall, a lot of production time was being wasted.

Solution: After much communication with the customer, I Holland recommended CX coating to overcome the sticking, and the corrosive element. To overcome the issues of die bore ringing, we utilised tungsten carbide dies to combat the tooling wear. These dies can withstand high compression strengths and offer extremely high resistance to wear. To solve the hardness issue, we implemented XDF tooling on the upper tooling to enhance tablet compaction and cohesion by increasing dwell time by up to 50%, rather than needing to increase compression force.

=