Siebler Striptabs Aid Production Of Film Tablets

Romaco has developed the Siebler Striptabs line for Indian contract manufacturer Ankur Drugs and Pharma. The system was created for the production and packaging of pharmaceutical film tablets. Taken orally, wafer-thin Striptabs dissolve on the tongue in seconds. This type of medication, which is based on a starch and polymer solution, is used in pain and hormone therapies and for treating erectile dysfunction.

Striptabs are currently being considered as a carrier for more than 600 different APIs. Customised manufacturing and packaging processes are needed to handle the thumb-sized strip dosage forms, which are only 60-100 micrometres (um) thick. First, the active pharmaceutical ingredient suspension is prepared using a homogenising process on a vacuum-processing unit made by Romaco Frymakoruma. Directly blending in the APIs at the beginning of the process results in high dosing accuracy with extremely low active-ingredient tolerances.

Using a complex coating process, the liquid is then applied with a thickness tolerance of only one micrometre to a high-precision substrate film. After being conveyed through several drying units, the coated strips can be wound into rolls. The rolled material, with widths of up to 240mm, is transferred to a Siebler HM 2/500 heat-sealing machine for further processing. The Siebler HM 2/500 machine cuts and packs the Striptabs in peelable packages sealed on all four sides.

After unrolling, the coated substrate strips are first conveyed through the unit's precision cutting station. Here the film tablets are cut by a cylindrical cutting tool to the required dimensions of 20 x 30mm, leaving the carrier material intact. The use of this seamless die-cutting process results in zero-per cent cutting tolerances. The process also ensures the calculated product loss is less than five per cent. In the next step, the cut strips are pulled over a sharp-edged dispensing tongue, where they become separated from the substrate film and are conveyed as individual units to the sealing area.

A shuttle system carries the individual film tablets onto the primary packaging film with a sealing width of up to 500mm. The Striptabs processed in this way come to the HM 2/500 ten-line sealing process, which can reach a maximum packaging speed of 1,500 strips per minute. Sealed in light- and moisture-proof soft-aluminium foil pouches, the Striptabs have a shelf life of up to three years.

Synrad CO2 Laser Welds Polyethylene Film

Synrad's sealed CO2 lasers are used in a variety of industrial processes including cutting, welding, drilling and marking. Because CO2 lasers have very consistent output power and the heating process is always non-contact, laser-formed seals will remain consistent over hours of operation. For this particular application, which required sealing 0.05mm-thick polyethylene film, a Synrad 50W laser was used in conjunction with an XY table and a cutting head outfitted with a 63.5mm focal length lens.

This lens typically provides a 0.1mm focused spot size; however, for laser sealing operations, a larger spot size is often preferred. A larger spot size yields lower overall power density and leads to increased melting and less vaporisation of thin films. It also increases the weld line width, providing better weld strength.

For these reasons, the lens was unfocused slightly by increasing the standoff distance to around 5mm between the surface of the film and the tip of the cutting head, to obtain a 0.5mm-wide weld line on the plastic film. The cutting head traversed two layers of the film at a speed of 12.7m/min to produce the final finished seal. The resulting seal is consistent in strength across its entire length.