(748a) A Novel Method to Measure Powder Flow Properties Using a Small Amount of Material
AIChE Annual Meeting
2014
2014 AIChE Annual Meeting
Particle Technology Forum
Characterization and Measurement in Powder Processing
Friday, November 21, 2014 - 8:30am to 8:48am
One of the most frequently used bulk property characterization methods is the measurement of the change in bulk density as a function of applied normal stress; also known as compressibility. Historically, this was measured at two conditions: loose packing (i.e. bulk density ) and maximum packing (i.e. tapped density). More recently, the compressibility technique as performed using the Freeman Technology FT4 measures the change in bulk density as several points over a range of applied normal stress (0.5 – 15kPa). The result of this technique is a profile, as opposed to two points, and is more reproducible due to the conditioning step in the procedure. However, this test requires a large powder sample on the order of tens of grams.
Many applications have limited sample availability, such as pharmaceutical drug development. Therefore, a method that uses less material is of interest. Further, the determination of the minimum amount of material required to achieve the same results is of interest. This work introduces a novel compressibility method that uses less than 50mg of material. This method is validated against the FT4 compressibility test.