In-die ultrasonic and off-line air-coupled monitoring and characterization techniques for drug tablets

Mechanical integrity and properties of drug tablets may adversely affect their therapeutic and structural functions. An embedded ultrasound monitoring system for tablet mechanical property monitoring during compaction and a non-contact/non-destructive off-line air-coupled technique for determining the mechanical properties of coated drug tablets are presented. In the compaction monitoring system, the change of ToF and the reflection coefficient for the upper-punch surface interface as a function of compaction pressure has been studied. In the air-coupled measurement approach, air-coupled excitation and laser interferometric detection are utilized and their effectiveness in characterizing the mechanical properties of a drug tablet by examining its vibrational resonance frequencies is demonstrated. An iterative computational procedure based on the finite element method and Newton's method is developed to extract the mechanical properties of the coated tablet from a subset of its measured resonance frequenci...