Developing Spherical Agglomeration as a Tool for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: Mechanistic Understanding and Mathematical Modelling

Rachel Smith, Ph.D. 
Senior Lecturer
University of Sheffield

Rachel Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield, with expertise in industrial particulate manufacturing across pharmaceutical, agri-chemical, consumer and battery manufacturing industries. Her research is focussed on the development of micro-scale understanding of particle-particle and particle-fluid interactions, and using this to advance prediction and design of particulate manufacturing processes and product performance. Processes of interest include granulation, particle coating, spherical agglomeration, fluidized bed processes, spraying and spray-drying, slurry preparation and tableting/compaction. Her work uses both experimental and computational methods to address industrial particle processing opportunities and challenges. Rachel holds a BEng (Hons) and PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia, and joined the University of Sheffield in 2012.

Seminar Abstract: The micro-scale interactions between particles and fluids are fundamental to a wide range of industrial manufacturing processes, including granulation, coating, drying, and fluidized bed processes. Many of these processes play a critical role in industrial manufacturing, including foods, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, and battery manufacture. While substantial understanding of the nano- and micro- scale interactions between particles and fluids has been generated, the ability to use this knowledge to predict process performance, design manufacturing processes, and to tailor formulated particulate products to give desired performance is underdeveloped, and industry is often still reliant on substantial experimental trial and error approaches to product and process design. Spherical agglomeration is a size enlargement process which has recently gained interest in the pharmaceutical industry. It addresses the followability and compressibility related problems of irregular platelet or needle like crystals, by forming spherical-shaped agglomerates. This process is achieved by the addition of a binder liquid into a slurry of primary crystals which is often produced by anti-solvent crystallization. Currently, there is poor mechanistic understanding of the rate processes occurring for formation of spherical agglomerates, and there is a lack of useful tools to predict final agglomerate properties or process performance. In this presentation, recent work on the spherical agglomeration process will be discussed, and research spanning experimental observation,