(407f) Monitoring Loss-in-Weight Pharmaceutical Feeders through State Estimation
AIChE Annual Meeting
2020
2020 Virtual AIChE Annual Meeting
Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum
Control Strategies in Pharmaceutical Drug Product Development and Manufacturing
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - 9:15am to 9:30am
Loss-in-weight feeders are usually resorted to in drug product manufacturing. They are made up of a hopper, where the powder is collected and eventually refilled, an agitator, connected to a motor, and a screws system. Realtime monitoring of the feeder operation is inherently challenging, as the only available process measurement is the net weight of powder in the hopper. The mass flowrate of powder delivered by the feeder can only be obtained indirectly, as a discrete time derivative of the mass measurements in the hopper. The propagation of noise from the measured mass to the inferred mass flowrate can compromise the control of the powder flow and the monitoring of the whole manufacturing line. Commercial feeders tackle the problem by providing the user with a smoothed version of the indirect measurement of the mass flowrate, but this introduces a time delay with respect to the actual mass flowrate fed downstream. In presence of gross errors in the measurement of the mass in the hopper, the inaccuracy in the calculation of the mass flowrate is even greater.
In this study we improve the accuracy of estimation of the mass flowrate coming out of a feeding unit by the implementation of a state estimator [5]. State estimators are widely employed in the process industry, but few contributions in the literature consider their application to continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing [6]. The implemented state estimator is based on a recently developed hybrid model [7] and is tested on experimental data coming from a feeding system. The estimation framework can accurately estimate the states of the system, namely the mass of powder in the hopper (deprived of the measurement noise), the actual mass flowrate provided by the feeder and the effective density in the hopper (an additional variable that cannot be measured online but that is important for process monitoring). The state estimator demonstrates to be robust to the presence of gross measurement errors and faults. The estimated states can be used for detecting faults in the feeding unit and to monitor the downstream operation.
References
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[7] Bascone, D., F. Galvanin, N. Shah and S. García-Muñoz (2020). A hybrid mechanistic-empirical approach to the modelling of twin screw feeders for continuous tablet manufacturing. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., in press