Quadro Engineering Blog

How to Mill Particles Equally and Eliminate Formulation Waste

Written by Kathryn Perry | Oct 30, 2019 4:18:35 PM

Are you tired of throwing away material because it was milled below your target particle size range?

Material waste has the obvious consequence of reducing product yield, but it can also impact your formulation and content uniformity. For these reasons, it can be tempting to recover the over-milled product in your process, but this can sometimes do more harm than good.

The Customer Challenge - Powder flowability

Powder flowability will suffer due to a broad range of particle sizes causing powder segregation. Segregation then leads to issues with content uniformity and powder perishability, resulting in a higher degree of broken, inconsistent, and unusable tablets.

Limiting the number of undesirable fines is the best approach to avoid waste and maintain a high yield aside from re-granulating the material, which is a tedious and inefficient process bottleneck.

The Quadro Solution to reduce waste

Genuine Quadro screens and impellers operate in close proximity to one another, separated by very controlled narrow spacing. This small, highly-tolerance gap ensures all particles are milled with an equal amount of energy, while perfectly round screen holes maintain a consistent shearing profile.

Alternative supplier parts are often held to lower tolerances and introduce uncontrolled size reduction mechanisms/variables, which in turn reduce the amount of particle size control. For example, larger impeller-screen gaps are consequences of lower tolerances and will increase not only the degree of attrition between the screen and impeller but also the number of interparticle interactions, as well as the average particle residence time within the screen.

These factors contribute to unpredictable size reduction and often lead to larger particle size ranges and more fines.

With Genuine Quadro parts, particles are processed quickly and efficiently with a single shearing step as they exit the screen, forming a consistent distribution within a tight target size range.

The Importance to the Market

Reliably reduce waste and improve product yields with Quadro Genuine parts. Material is consistently delivered within tighter particle size ranges while reducing the chances of undesirable fines being generated.

As a result, valuable raw ingredients are protected and profit margins increase as yields increase. With Quadro Genuine parts, you can trust each run will provide consistent results, reducing the amount of potential quality testing, fine-tuning and powder blending after each step in your process. By obtaining on spec  results every time, you will save significant processing time and energy, while
increasing production capacities without having to expand your current operations.

Genuine parts from Quadro

By buying parts from Quadro you will benefit from:

  • Proprietary designs optimizing process performance
  • Increased capacity & longer lasting parts
  • Less operational down-time
  • Consistent quality & controlled geometric tolerances
  • Unmatched batch-to-batch process repeatability
  • More particle size range control meaning less waste & rework
  • Sustainable reduction in associated manufacturing & maintenance costs

(Ref: CS Eliminate Formulation Waste)