Title: Innovative process for manufacturing pharmaceutical mini-tablets using 3D printing
Providing drug products for pediatric patients is a challenging problem for the pharmaceutical industry. Children often require flexible low-dose medication with features like taste-masking and ease of swallowing. In recent years, mini-tablets have emerged as an attractive dosing solution that can meet these requirements. They are small form oral dosages around 2-4 mm in diameter that can be dispensed individually or in combination. Conventionally, they are made using methods like direct compression and hot melt extrusion. This study introduces a new technique to make mini-tablets: drop-on-demand 3D printing. Here the active ingredient is suspended in a liquid excipient, the formulation is printed as droplets and each drop is solidified to yield a mini-tablet. An optimal solvent bath that can uniformly capture mini-tablets is designed and dosages of Atorvastatin (active ingredient) are produced as a test case. Quality of these dosages is determined by measuring their content uniformity. more »« less
Uduebor, M; Daniels, J; Saulick, Y; Naqvi, W; Cetin, Bora
(, International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering)
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(Ed.)
Applying organo-silanes (OS) as water-repellent additives can enhance soil properties, crucial for use as moisture barriers in infrastructures like roads, landfills, and tunnels. This study used four soil samples and glass beads, treated with three OS products at dosages from 1:1 to 1:1000. Laboratory tests included contact angle, water drop penetration, and breakthrough pressure on 216 samples. Results showed increased hydrophobicity with higher OS dosages, with contact angles over 110° and Water Drop Penetration Test times above 3600s. However, effectiveness plateaued at certain dosages, indicated by electrical conductivity and pH changes. The primary factors (94.6% influence) were soil type, OS product, dosage, and drying condition, while reaction time, and leaching/washing had a minor impact (5.4%). Treated soils could sustain a hydrostatic head of up to 17 kPa. These insights aid in optimizing water-repellency treatments for soil performance and infrastructure durability in geotechnical applications.
Sundarkumar, Varun; Nagy, Zoltan_K; Reklaitis, Gintaras_V
(, AIChE Journal)
Abstract The pharmaceutical manufacturing sector needs to rapidly evolve to absorb the next wave of disruptive industrial innovations—Industry 4.0. This involves incorporating technologies like artificial intelligence and 3D printing (3DP) to automate and personalize the drug production processes. This study aims to build a formulation and process design (FPD) framework for a pharmaceutical 3DP platform that recommends operating (formulation and process) conditions at which consistent drop printing can be obtained. The platform used in this study is a displacement‐based drop‐on‐demand 3D printer that manufactures dosages by additively depositing the drug formulation as droplets on a substrate. The FPD framework is built in two parts: the first part involves building a machine learning model to simulate the forward problem—predicting printer operation for given operating conditions and the second part seeks to solve and experimentally validate the inverse problem—predicting operating conditions that can yield desired printer operation.
In this paper, we investigate the threat of drones equipped with recording devices, which capture videos of individuals typing on their mobile devices and extract the touch input such as passcodes from the videos. Deploying this kind of attack from the air is significantly challenging because of camera vibration and movement caused by drone dynamics and the wind. Our algorithms can estimate the motion trajectory of the touching finger, and derive the typing pattern and then touch inputs. Our experiments show that we can achieve a high success rate against both tablets and smartphones with a DJI Phantom drone from a long distance. A 2.5" NEUTRON mini drone flies outside a window and also achieves a high success rate against tablets behind the window. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to systematically study drones revealing user inputs on mobile devices and use the finger motion trajectory alone to recover passcodes typed on mobile devices.
Buckley, Jenni; Trauth, Amy; De_Rosa, Alexander
(, ASEE Conferences)
Practicing mechanical engineers interface regularly with machinists to design and manufacture components in metal and other engineered materials. Direct, hands-on exposure to precision machining operations, like mill and lathe work, helps young engineers design manufacturable components and facilitates better collaboration with machinists. Mechanical engineering undergraduate programs have been cited for weaknesses in training students on industry-standard manufacturing practices. While there are several excellent examples in the literature of student manufacturing projects, these projects are relatively advanced on the whole, and they require extensive human and capital resources to deploy in large-enrollment classes. Prior investigators have conserved resources by teaming students on projects, which dilutes the hands-on manufacturing experience for individual learners. In this study, we present an introductory mill training exercise for engineering students that allows them to individually develop transferable machining skills but requires fairly modest resources. This exercise, which we call the “Mini-Mill Experience,” involves students individually manufacturing two separate parts with a hobby-grade mini-mill and then completing a written self-reflection documenting their procedures and final part inspection. Students first manufacture a simple part out of reusable wax with direct coaching from a teaching assistant. They then independently manufacture one of six different wooden Erector Set components. The Mini-Mill Experience is designed to give students firsthand experience and promote confidence with the basic mill controls and operations, e.g., changing out an endmill or squaring up a face, that are transferable to the full-sized mills they will use in later courses. The one-time equipment set-up costs for this exercise were approximately $60 per student, with recurring costs of less than $2 per student for stock material. Each student completed the exercise during a two-hour lab period, and it took approximately six weeks for all students in the course (ca. 170 students) to complete the exercise. All sessions were supervised by a machinist and one to two teaching assistants. To gauge the effectiveness of the Mini-Mill Experience, a survey was distributed to all students in a freshmen year mechanical engineering design course. Survey responses indicated that the majority of the students (77%) had no prior experience with mills. Post-activity, students reported high levels of self-confidence in identifying the critical components of a mill and most basic mill operations, like proper use of a vise and tool changes. Compared to students who had prior mill experience, students with no prior experience demonstrated slightly lower self-efficacy with more advanced mill operations like creating blind holes and tapping threads. Post-activity, 75% of students agreed they “were not intimidated or afraid to use the mill to make a part,” and 90% said that they “looked forward to their next experience on a mill.” In this study, we developed an introductory manufacturing experience – the “Mini-Mill Experience” – that is effective in teaching basic mill operations, promotes students’ self-efficacy and enthusiasm for future machining experiences, and is cost effective and scalable for large class sizes. In these ways, it is a valuable addition to the existing literature and curriculum on manufacturing education for mechanical engineers. Future work by our group will focus on whether the skills acquired in the Mini-Mill Experience are transferable to manufacturing experiences later in the curriculum.
Alkene oligomerization on heterogeneous Ni-based catalysts has been studied for several decades, with recent attention focused on the preparation, structure and function of Ni active site motifs isolated within microporous and mesoporous supports, including zeolites and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). This mini-review focuses on the active site requirements and the microscopic kinetic and mechanistic details that become manifested macroscopically as activation and deactivation behavior during oligomerization catalysis and that determine measured reaction rates and selectivity among alkene isomer products. The preponderance of mechanistic evidence is consistent with the coordination–insertion (Cossee–Arlman) cycle for alkene oligomerization prevailing on heterogeneous Ni-exchanged zeolites and MOFs, even when external co-catalysts are not present, as they often are in homogeneous Ni-based oligomerization catalysis. Certain mechanistic features of the coordination–insertion route allow catalyst and active site design strategies to influence product selectivity. Our mini-review provides a critical discussion of reported alkene oligomerization data and the challenges in their measurement and interpretation and concludes with an outlook for future research opportunities to improve our kinetic and mechanistic understanding of alkene chain growth chemistries mediated by Ni-based porous catalysts.
Sundarkumar, V, Wang, W, Nagy, Z.K., and Reklaitis, G.V. Innovative process for manufacturing pharmaceutical mini-tablets using 3D printing. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10434973. Computer aided chemical engineering 52. Web. doi:10.1016/B978-0-443-15274-0.50309-7.
Sundarkumar, V, Wang, W, Nagy, Z.K., & Reklaitis, G.V. Innovative process for manufacturing pharmaceutical mini-tablets using 3D printing. Computer aided chemical engineering, 52 (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10434973. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-15274-0.50309-7
@article{osti_10434973,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Innovative process for manufacturing pharmaceutical mini-tablets using 3D printing},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10434973},
DOI = {10.1016/B978-0-443-15274-0.50309-7},
abstractNote = {Providing drug products for pediatric patients is a challenging problem for the pharmaceutical industry. Children often require flexible low-dose medication with features like taste-masking and ease of swallowing. In recent years, mini-tablets have emerged as an attractive dosing solution that can meet these requirements. They are small form oral dosages around 2-4 mm in diameter that can be dispensed individually or in combination. Conventionally, they are made using methods like direct compression and hot melt extrusion. This study introduces a new technique to make mini-tablets: drop-on-demand 3D printing. Here the active ingredient is suspended in a liquid excipient, the formulation is printed as droplets and each drop is solidified to yield a mini-tablet. An optimal solvent bath that can uniformly capture mini-tablets is designed and dosages of Atorvastatin (active ingredient) are produced as a test case. Quality of these dosages is determined by measuring their content uniformity.},
journal = {Computer aided chemical engineering},
volume = {52},
author = {Sundarkumar, V and Wang, W and Nagy, Z.K. and Reklaitis, G.V.},
}
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