Introduction

As part of the development of continuous manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry, appropriate solutions dealing with short-term malfunctions of upstream units or upstream discharge of out-of-specification material must be implemented. The implementation of a rotary tablet press in a continuous manufacturing line gives possibilities regarding the development of an overall control concept and an discharge strategy. Based on a feasibility study, it was concluded that a promising approach is the implementation of different operating points for the turret speed (recipe set point, set point low, set point high) [1]. This concept allows reactions on upstream variations in mass flow, in order to keep the filling height in the tablet press hopper constant. However it has to be guaranteed, that with changes in turret speed tablets stay within the spec. The main scope of the experiment was to evaluate, if turret speed changes have a significant impact on the standard deviation in weight and height of the product.