Solis™ Spider Wheel

Heterogeneous solids are found in a variety of products from pharmaceutical pills or tablets, cereals, or polymer blends. A key challenge in manufacturing heterogeneous solids is the ability to collect a representative sample while it is being produced for quality control or process monitoring purposes. The Solis™ interface from Expo Process Analytics addresses the challenge of representative sampling for dense heterogeneous solids and enables automated PAT for unit operations such as blending, granulation, or tablet pressing. Unlike the disperse streams found at mill or spray dryer outputs — where the challenge is too little material in front of the probe — dense streams present the opposite challenge: sufficient material, but spectroscopically non-representative without controlled sample flow.

The Solis™ is an inline probe interface. It uses a rotating wheel that captures a representative volume of powder stream for PAT analysis. If used in process development, its ability to vary the rotation speed enables a QbD approach and streamlines analytical development. If used in manufacturing, the variable rotation speed can be changed via a controller to accommodate a variety of powder or granule types, or flow rates without needing to change process hardware. The controlled and quantified sample flow rate results in a defined unit mass that is presented to a PAT probe, resulting in increased process robustness and hands-free operations.

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