On the 6th of May, 2020, Michael Ghijs successfully defended his PhD online! Find below the content and the full PhD dissertation at the bottom of the page.
Content: In the transition of the pharmaceutical industry to continuous manufacturing, novel process configurations are being made. This includes the GEA ConsiGma™, which achieves wet granulation of pharmaceutical powders for which it is necessary to enhance processability for tablet production. A crucial step in this process is the drying of the granules, this is performed in a semicontinuous fluid bed dryer.
With the aim of predicting the process behavior in this dryer, it is attempted to create a computational model of this system, in this PhD. The process proved, however, to be more complex than the model assumed. Therefore, a new data collection method was devised for acquiring highly detailed data on a fluid bed drying process, where the characteristics of as many individual granules as possible were measured. With this proven valid on a batch system, also the semicontinuous drying behavior on a ConsiGma™ could be characterized. Finally, also the breaking of granules through passage through the drying system was modelled. For this, the high resolution data on particle size was analyzed with compositional data techniques. Overall, the PhD augments the information quality of the data that is used for building mathematical models on fluid bed drying.