Enabling energy‐efficient manufacturing of pharmaceutical solid oral dosage forms via integrated techno‐economic analysis and advanced process modeling

Abstract

The global pharmaceutical industry is a trillion-dollar market. However, the pharmaceutical sector often lags in manufacturing innovation and automation which limits its potential to maximize energy efficiency. The integration of technoeconomic analysis (TEA) with advanced process models as part of an overarching smart manufacturing platform, can help industries create business models, which can be adapted for manufacturing to reduce energy consumption and operating costs while ensuring product quality which can further enable a more sustainable process operation. In this study, a rational design of experiment on three unitoperations (wet granulation, drying, and milling) was performed on a batch (case 1) and continuous (case 2) pharmaceutical process to obtain experimental data. Process models for predicting product quality and energy efficiency of each of the three-unit operations were developed. The experimental data were used to validate the models and good agreement was observed. The energy consumption of each unit operation was calculated using statistical models relating the power consumption and the process parameters. The developed process models and energy models were further integrated into a TEA framework, which quantified the energy and monetary cost of manufacturing for both batch and continuous manufacturing cases. With this integrated framework, energy costs savings of ~33% was obtained in the continuous manufacturing process (case 2) over the batch process (case 1). K E Y W O R D Sadvanced process models, energy efficiency, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, technoeconomic analysis Chaitanya Sampata and Lalith Kotamarthy contributed equally to this study.

Sustainable Upgrading of Glycerol into Glycidol and Its Derivatives Under Continuous-Flow Conditions

“…To construct a fair comparison with respect to the literature, our results were compared with similar TEA studies investigating the performance improvement in API production, where typically a reduction in energy expenses of 25.6% have been observed through the implementation of flow conditions. 30 In our case, with the observed 92.9% reduction in energy expenses, the study succeeded to achieve a performance beyond the literature. Overall, the TEA confirmed that the flow process demonstrated to be economically more feasible with respect to the conventional batch configuration.…”

End-point determination of heterogeneous formulations using inline torque measurements for a high-shear wet granulation process

“…Recent work on the evaluation of torque to control PSD in a continuous twin-screw granulator (TSG) indicated more obstacles, as the torque values indicated not only the energy supplied to rotate the screws but also the energy absorbed by materials ( Ryckaert et al 2021 ). In the case of the TSG, although torque measurements have been used to capture the energy expenditure during granulation, it is difficult to interpret torque profiles in a manner that provides a good correlation to granulation mechanisms ( Sampat et al 2022 ). These issues are largely dependent on the scale and the type of equipment used for granulation.…”