Improving Continuous Powder Blending Performance Using Projection to Latent Structures Regression

There has been increasing interest in the last few years especially within the pharmaceutical industry towards continuous powder blending. In this paper, the effects of different design and operating parameters are investigated, which include blade speed, shaft angle, weir height, fill level, blade angle, and blade width. The projection to latent structures regression is introduced to elucidate the significance of these factors on the two key indices of continuous blending performance, the local blending rate and the mean axial velocity. Shaft angle and blade speed are the two most influential factors pointing to a blending improvement strategy. The proposed strategy is examined using an experimental setup for the production of pharmaceutical powder mixtures.