title: Estimation of bottle filling counts for conventional pharmaceutical tablets and capsules.
abstract: A method has been developed using commonly available data for estimating the number of tablets or hard shell capsules that can be filled into bottles. The single unit volumes of conventional pharmaceutical biconvex tablets and capsules can be calculated from simple geometric relationships, which then can be used to determine the packing fraction of the units in bottles. The packing fractions of capsules and tablets studied in this work ranged from 0.53 to 0.63 and 0.56 to 0.62, respectively, and were dependent on bottle size and shape. This method can be used to assess a variety of packaging configurations computationally during drug product development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Drug Product Design, Pfizer Inc. , Groton, CT , USA.
authors.forename: Matthew P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Mullarney
authors.forename: Allan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hutchins
authors.forename: Graeme
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Taylor
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002214:Capsules; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004349:Drug Packaging; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010316:Particle Size; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013607:Tablets
chemical_list: D002214:Capsules; D013607:Tablets
keywords: Bottle; capsule; density; packing fraction; solid fraction; tablet