DescriptionTraditionally, the pharmaceutical industries have been using batch processes for their ease of production of a broad range of products using the same equipment. But due to the increased challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry and limitations of batch process manufacturing of pharmaceutical products such as controllability and scale-up issues, the pharmaceutical industries have led to come up with more efficient manufacturing techniques and transitioning to the continuous production of pharmaceutical products. To facilitate the speed of transition, the importance of process engineering and optimization through modeling has surfaced. Robust modeling of different unit operations and integration of them create numerous applications. These include analysis of the effect of variation in critical process parameters on the product quality attributes and leads into a reduction in the wastage of time and material via dynamic optimization of a process in comparison to a traditional heuristic experimental based method.
In this work, a model-based method has been proposed to investigate, analyze, and identify the feeder refill strategy. A systematic framework was developed for the dynamic optimization of a unit operation, which was exemplified through the optimization of the refill strategy. The effect of process parameters and material properties on the refill parameters was also investigated.