To determine fundamental difference between rheological and thermal properties of microcrystalline cellulose granules formed by using water and iso propyl alcohol as granulating agents

Most commonly faced problems by pharmaceutical industry are content uniformity and weight variation. This may attributed to poor flow of powder from hopper to the or segregation of the powders in the hopper. Good flow property is desired for uniform die fill and for many processes like blending, transfer, storage, feeding, and compaction.;Powder flowability can be increased by granulation. Granulation is a agglomeration process in which small diameter solid particles agglomerates to form particles of larger diameter. Earlier work has been carried out by granulation of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) with excipients like MCC and lactose. Analysis of different particle size of granules proved that large particle size of API will lead to content uniformity of the tablets.;The aim of our experiments was to determine fundamental difference between rheological and thermal properties of MCC granules formed by using water and Iso Propyl Alcohol (70%) as a granulating agent with effusivity measurements.;It has been found that when water is used for granulation MCC shows i.e. irreversible hydrogen bonding. As a result there is less number of --H groups available to form new bonds. The bonding strength of MCC is more in water granules as compared to those with Water/ethanol granules which leads to poor compressibility and compactibility of water granules. This effect may be due to primary compaction energy which is utilized in breaking primary granule structure as well as hydrogen bonding. Some researchers attributed this property is due to densification of MCC in wet granulation. However some scientist showed that this difference in strength of this pellets is due to conversion of some of the intramolecular hydrogen bonded amorphous fibrils at the surface to intermolecular hydrogen bonded fibrils.;Some of the earlier work determines the relationship between wet mass consistency and dry granules properties. Wet mass with good consistency produces dry granules with good flow properties. These results were carried out using mixer torque rheometer.;The thermal property of MCC changes due to addition of large amount of water MCC glass transitions are affected by presence of water. We have used Standard Differential Scanning calorimetry to determine changes in Tg of MCC.;We are Using Freeman Technology 4 (FT4) powder rheometer to analyse rheological property of wet mass as well as dry mass of water granules and water-IPA granules. Effusivity measurements were also carried to determine water content.;Rheological, thermal and effusivity measured showed us that granules prepared by IPA(70%) have better flow property, tabletability, compression and compaction.