Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Manufacturing

This application note provides an overview of the successful use of magnetically coupled seal-less centrifugal pumps to provide head feed to a pharmaceutical process.

THE INDUSTRY

A world leader in ultrasonic, pharmaceutical particle engineering technologies manufactures high-volume pharmaceutical powders, which are used to make better medicines. The company provides solutions for asthma, COPD and other respiratory disorder market sectors as well as orally and parentally delivered products, such as those with poor aqueous solubility where particle size and morphology control are important.

THE APPLICATION

This application involves pharmaceutical processes to solve complex pharmaceutical solid-state problems, such as controlling the crystal size, shape and polymorph for active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). A constant pressure head feed pump is used to pump a mixture of water, heptane, methanol and ethanol into pharmaceutical slurry that contains solid materials. The technology can be used for the manufacture of API of any scale. With this application, products are provided that offer dose-to-dose uniformity, consistency in formulation, stability and increased performance of inhaled API. API can be manufactured from a combination of particles.

THE PUMP SOLUTION

Micropump CA Series centrifugal pumps are direct coupled to a microprocessor based controller drive and RS232 link for PC-based operating control.

FEATURE	ADVANTAGE	BENEFIT
Centrifugal Pump Design	No seals to fail	Easy to monitor, easy to control
	Smooth, pulse-free flow	Reduced downtime and less production lost
	Accurate, pulse-less output	Consistent metering of components
Controller Drive	Dispensed volume can be easily controlled	Accurate and controlled flow rate and dispense volumes