Elastoplastic Response of Compacted Pharmaceutical Powder Blends: Model Development, Calibration and Validation.
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Abstract
The compaction of granular materials is a common operation in many industrial manufacturing processes, ranging from farming to pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements to diagnostics, and many others. The operation involves combining a mixture of powdered substances into a single bonded compact, or tablet, through the application of compressive forces. The process mainly consists of four stages: die filling, compaction, unloading, and ejection. During the compaction, particles are rearranged and undergo elastic and plastic deformation, which leads to particle bonds formation. In the last two steps, the whole compact experiences elastic relaxation after being plastically deformed during fabrication. It is well known that the performance of compacted particulate products is directly related to their microstructure. However, how the properties at mesoscale and nanoscale manifest at the continuum level for granular compacted materials is still an open question. Here we introduce an update of the nanoHUB Powder Compaction tool that is capable of modeling the first three manufacturing steps mentioned above. The tool includes a particle mechanics approach to model the compaction process using generalized loading-unloading contact laws for elastoplastic spheres with bonding strength. We calibrate and validate the model using experimental data obtained with a bench top tablet press. We anticipate that our tool will provide the research community the means to better understand the underlying mechanics of compaction, up to porosities close to zero, and we demonstrate that seamless integration of experimental and computational methods is paramount for the development of the powder compaction field.
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