Precompetitive
collaborations on new enabling technologies for
research and development are becoming popular among pharmaceutical
companies. The Enabling Technologies Consortium (ETC), a precompetitive
collaboration of leading innovative pharmaceutical companies, identifies
and executes projects, often with third-party collaborators, to develop
new tools and technologies of mutual interest. Here, we report the
results of one of the first ETC projects: the development of a user-friendly
population balance model (PBM)-based crystallization simulator software.
This project required the development of PBM software with integrated
experimental data handling, kinetic parameter regression, interactive
process simulation, visualization, and optimization capabilities incorporated
in a computationally efficient and robust software platform. Inputs
from a team of experienced scientists at 10 ETC member companies helped
define a set of software features that guided a team of crystallization
modelers to develop software incorporating these features. Communication,
continuous testing, and feedback between the ETC and the academic
team facilitated the software development. The product of this project,
a software tool called CrySiV, an acronym for Crystallization Simulation
and Visualization, is reported herein. Currently, CrySiV can be used
for cooling, antisolvent, and combined cooling and antisolvent crystallization
processes, with primary and secondary nucleation, growth, dissolution,
agglomeration, and breakage of crystals. This paper describes the
features and the numerical methods of the software and presents two
case studies demonstrating its use for parameter estimation. In the
first case study, a simulated data set is used to demonstrate the
capabilities of the software to find kinetic parameters and its goodness
of fit to a known solution. In the second case study, the kinetics
of an antisolvent crystallization of indomethacin from a ternary solvent
system are estimated, providing a practical example of the tool.