The influence of pellet shape and film coating on the filling of pellets into hard shell capsules

Stages in spheronisation: Evolution of pellet size and shape during spheronisation of microcrystalline cellulose-based paste extrudates

“…The AR data for the 1 mm rods increase, reflecting breakage, until t* reaches 0.30, as noted above. The final AR values for all three rod sizes, at 0.95 ± 0.03, lie within the range of acceptability for coating or tableting applications [6].…”

A novel lab-scale screen extruder for studying extrusion-spheronisation

“…The pellet shape was quantified by its aspect ratio, defined as L min /L max , where L max and L min are the largest dimension on a 2-dimensional projection of a particle and the dimension normal to it, respectively. This differs from the parameters employed by workers such as Chopra et al (2002), who defined the aspect ratio as L max /L min . The latter is termed the elongation ratio in several texts (e.g.…”

“…Table 5 shows that the pellet mean d CE , mean aspect ratio and mean circularity are about 1 mm, 0.88 and 0.97, respectively. The pellets were judged to be of acceptable shape since their mean aspect ratios lie above the threshold value of 0.8 (Chopra et al, 2002) with relatively narrow distributions. These results suggest that the 45 wt% MCC/water paste can be extruded in the LRS to give pellets with acceptable size and shape qualities.…”

Extrusion–spheronisation of microcrystalline cellulose pastes using a non-aqueous liquid binder

“…8 show well-rounded pellets with acceptable size and shape distributions. A fraction lay above the limiting aspect ratio of 1.2 required for reproducible coating and reliable controlled release suggested by Chopra et al (2002). There is, however, considerable scope for optimisation of both the extrusion and spheronisation conditions to reach this target, as reported extensively in the literature (e.g.…”