Scale-Up of Film Coating

Although both sugar and film coating are utilized by a significant number of pharmaceutical companies worldwide, the film-coating process is the one most often preferred today. 

Despite the apparent variety expressed by these options, aqueous systems hold a dominant position in the pharmaceutical industry at this time. As a consequence, serious constraints are often imposed on the products being coated, the coating formulations used, and the coating processes that are adopted, with the result that scaling up the coating process can present serious challenges. 

At the heart of any coating process is the coating vessel, which can take one of two forms  

Since the majority of film-coating operations around the world utilize aqueous coating processes, it is often useful to apply thermodynamic models to the process. In this way, the development-scale process can be fundamentally characterized, based on application of the first law of thermodynamics, as suggested by Ebey (6), allowing more accurate predictions for operating 

Process parameter Initial process Modified process 

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