Role of Precompression in the Mitigation of Capping: A Case Study.

Capping is an important industrial problem that can arise during the manufacturing of pharmaceutical tablets. It corresponds, for biconvex tablets, to the detachment of one of the cups of the tablet during the ejection from the press or after relaxation. Solutions to this problem remain mainly empirical. Among them, precompression is widely used. One of the most popular explanation of the role of precompression in the mitigation of capping is that it increases the total time under compression. Following this interpretation, press manufacturers developped devices or machines that make it possible to maintain the pressure between precompression and main compression. In this note, we present a case study of capping. For the formulation proposed, a precompression that was maintained until the compression gave similar results as no precompression at all, i.e. capping of all the tablets. On the contrary, if the precompression was released before compression, capping stops completely. In this case, the effect of precompression is thus due to the separation of two compression events. Moreover, results prove that this separation must last long enough for the precompression to be efficient. This example shows that effect of precompression is more complex than often described in the literature.

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