Development of Novel Cascade Type Crystallizer for Continuous Production of Crystalline Particles

Abstract The introduction of a continuous crystallisation process has been attracting attention for the pharmaceutical products. We designed a novel continuous crystallizer, which includes Couette–Taylor equipment integrated with MSMPR equipment in a cascading manner. Additionally, feed solutions were supplied to MSMPR and Couette–Taylor equipment to flexibly control the supersaturation of the MSMPR equipment, regardless of the supersaturation of Couette–Taylor equipment. In this study, the relationship between operating parameters in novel cascade–type crystallizer and final crystal quality was investigated. We found that the quality of the obtained crystalline particles depend on the flow-rate ratio of the feed solution supplied to Couette–Taylor equipment. Furthermore, the yield of crystalline products was improved using proposed crystallizer. Therefore, we expect proposed novel cascade–type crystallizer consisting of Couette–Taylor and MSMPR equipment to obtain crystalline products with various quality.