L. B. Bohle’s Technology Center Merges All Steps of Continuous Production

L.B. Bohle Maschinen + Verfahren GmbH has inaugurated its Technology Center at the Bohle headquarters in Ennigerloh, creating a platform for new processes and knowledge transfer. With the inauguration of the Technology Center, the engineers, scientists, pharmacists, and IT developers for the first time closed the loop control circuit of a modular system along the entire process including production, sensor technology and controlling.

"Series production is set to start as soon as we have received FDA clearance. There is no need to develop, install, and validate a new production line," explained Hubertus Rehbaum, manager scientific operation at Bohle, in a press statement.

According to the company, essential elements of success for this project include having good machines at all process steps that are optimally linked, both physically and technically, in terms of data. Secondly, the machines must be equipped with sensor and measurement technology and all the data must be integrated on a common platform via standardized interfaces.

The software integration, in turn, forms the basis of permanent monitoring, controlling, and documentation of the continuous production process. Advanced spectroscopy technologies, such as NIR and Raman, enable precise measurement and analysis during the individual production steps. Companies such as Kaiser Optical Systems, Sentronic, and Kraemer Elektronik, were involved in the project.

L.B. Bohle stated that the major challenge arose from directly processing this generated data and making it available for use. Together with the IT partners and university scientists, models had to be developed for simulating various processes as well as for defining and automatically initiating corresponding measures and interventions.

Lorenz Bohle mentioned that the unique feature of the company’s Technology Center, is that “the tablet production can be implemented either without granulation or with dry or wet granulation in one system.”

The modular concept of continuous production offers time savings because it does not require any time-consuming analyses of the product samples between the process steps. Moreover, producers benefit from greater flexibility because the plant can be quickly converted to different products.

Source: L. B. Bohle