Efficient containment in seven steps

The phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try is pro­cess­ing increas­ing­ly larg­er vol­umes of tox­ic and high­ly-active sub­stances, some of which are used in can­cer and hor­mone treat­ment ther­a­pies. This is also accom­pa­nied by increased demands on user safe­ty and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion. Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers are react­ing to these tech­ni­cal chal­lenges by using ever more effi­cient con­tain­ment solutions.
At the Achema indus­try fair in Frank­furt am Main, Fette Com­pact­ing pre­sent­ed its very own approach for effi­cient con­tain­ment in the form of its Con­tain­ment Guard. Vis­i­tors to the trade fair stand will dis­cov­er how the tablet­ing experts guar­an­tee cus­tomized con­tain­ment for any press using a stan­dard­ized mea­sure­ment procedure.
With its Con­tain­ment Guard, Fette Com­pact­ing has devel­oped the first qual­i­ty cer­tifi­cate for estab­lish­ing the reten­tion rates of con­tain­ment tablet­ing sys­tems on the basis of an extreme­ly pre­cise stan­dard­ized process. The results of these series of tests are used to derive the Con­tain­ment Guard lev­el. These lev­els cor­re­spond to the OEB lev­els (Occu­pa­tion­al Expo­sure Band) of the con­tain­ment pyra­mid. On this basis, the Con­tain­ment Guard doc­u­ments the reten­tion rate of the test­ed con­tain­ment press.

Seven steps to the Containment Guard

For expo­sure mea­sure­ment dur­ing tablet pro­duc­tion, the loca­tion of the mea­sur­ing probes and oper­a­tors dur­ing the mea­sure­ment process is impor­tant. Equal­ly impor­tant is the num­ber of tablet sam­ples drawn for qual­i­ty con­trol in the Check­mas­ter and/or what oper­at­ing modes and mal­func­tions are pos­si­ble for the tablet press. The Con­tain­ment Guard tests all of this in sev­en mea­sure­ment sce­nar­ios or “cycles”.
Each test run begins with a zero mea­sure­ment estab­lish­ing the basic expo­sure of the mea­sure­ment cham­ber with the test sub­stance. Then the machine works in nor­mal mode for half an hour in order to cal­cu­late the reten­tion rate dur­ing smooth pro­duc­tion. This is fol­lowed by sim­u­la­tion of typ­i­cal work steps: the tes­ter­op­er­a­tors feed tools into the machine, clean the machine inte­ri­or, dis­man­tle the fill­ing sta­tion or remove the machine’s process equipment.
An error test sim­u­lates a pow­er fail­ure for deter­min­ing con­tain­ment in the event of a fault. This involves ini­tial­ly run­ning the tablet press and the fil­ter unit for five min­utes in reg­u­lar mode before switch­ing them off and allow­ing the emer­gency air man­age­ment sys­tem to take over for the next 30 min­utes. In order to achieve max­i­mum accu­ra­cy of mea­sure­ment results, each of the sev­en mea­sure­ment cycles is repeat­ed three times for each press to be measured.