Evaluation of powder rheology as a potential tool to predict tablet sticking

Abstract Tablet sticking, a phenomenon in which material adheres to the surface of tablet-punch face, is an ongoing and costly problem in pharmaceutical manufacturing, and is a significant issue for drug-product formulators. Here, it was hypothesized that the underlying cause of this phenomenon is due to intermolecular interactions between punch face and drug molecules. The present study evaluates powder rheology as a potential predictive technique for these interactions between the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) and punch face. In this study, we describe a series of powder rheology experiments to estimate the sticking tendencies of five model drugs to five different tablet punch metals. The results have shown that this approach was able to differentiate the five model drugs based on their sticking propensity to each punch metal used. Furthermore, the predicted sticking tendency rank order of the drugs obtained from powder rheology technique was validated by compression studies.