This looks good; however, let’s discuss the priorities. Currently, further understanding is needed for both web compression (calendar) and tablet compression (die press). The web compression trials are important; however, the priority is low because there are no customer or design concerns right now. As for the tablet compression trials, the plants are currently supplying parts with low performance. Increasing understanding of tablets is needed so solutions can be found. This means that tablet trials are a much higher priority than web trials, and the recommendation would be to focus the majority of time on tablets.
There are two different approaches to complete the tablet trials. The first way is to complete the Compression Trials (Item 4) and the Adsorbent Ratio (Item 5) trials separately. However, we need more information to optimize the tablet performance. This can be accomplished by completing a compression study for every combination of carbon/silica; however, this would be a lot of work. It would require a lot of tablets to be built and a lot of testing time. This is not ideal.
The other way would be to setup a Design of Experiments (DOE). This would greatly reduce the number of tablets/trials that need to be built and tested. It will also provide a lot of valuable information on how to design future parts. I am not sure who is familiar with DOEs in the RDL group; however, Apichai has good experience with setting up these type of trials. The preparation and analysis are important, and he may be able to assist with this.
I’ve also provided an example below. The idea is to have two different variables for the experiment, everything else will be controlled. A statistical analysis can then be performed on the data.
Here’s the order:
1) Select one tablet die that can be used in the lab
2) Determine the two variables that are important (Already complete: Compression Force and Adsorbent Ratio)
3) Determine the limits of the variables (This is easy for the ratio, but may take some trials to understand compression limits)
4) Set the high and low variables for the DOE
5) Build 5 tablets from table below
6) Collect Dry Weight, Thickness, and Isotherm data for each tablet.
7) Complete Statistical Analysis (Apichai or I can assist with this part)
The third step is to understand the limits of Variable A and B and determine if they are acceptable. For the ratio variable, it is easy. The limits would be 100:0 and 0:100 ratios. Those limits wouldn’t help us understand how blended tablets work though. It is important to have the limits far away from each other, but still represent the final goal. Something like 25:75 and 75:25 ratios would work well.
For Variable B, more work will be needed to understand the limits. I would recommend completing a few pre-trials to determine the highest and lowest compression forces that can be used for both a EN115 only tablet, and an EN186 tablet (with your selected tablet die from step 1). Then use the highest and lowest values that work for both tablets. So if the maximum on the EN115 is 4 tons, and the maximum on the carbon is 3 tons, the maximum for this experiment would be 3 tons. This is the most important step of this DOE.
Variable A= Compression Force
Variable B= EN186:EN115 Ratio
1 = high value
-1 = low value
Mid = mid value (These values will be half way between the high and low values 50:50 ratio and (Avg of High and Low compressions))