Characterization of herbal powder blends homogeneity using near-infrared spectroscopy

Homogeneity of powder blend is essential to obtain uniform contents for the tablets and capsules. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy with fiber-optic probe was used as an on-line technique for monitoring the homogeneity of pharmaceutical blend during the blending process instead of the traditional techniques, such as high performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) method. In this paper NIRS with a SabIR diffuse reflectance fiber-optic probe was used to monitor the blending process of coptis powder and lactose (excipient) with different contents, and further qualitative methods, like similarity, moving block of standard deviation and mean square were used for calculation purposes with the collected spectra after the pretreatment of multiplicative signal correction (MSC) and second derivative. Correlation spectrum was used for the wavelength selection. Four different coptis were blended with lactose separately to validate the proposed method, and the blending process of "liu wei di huang" pill was also simulated in bottles to verify this method on multiple herbal blends. The overall results suggest that NIRS is a simple, effective and noninvasive technique can be successfully applied to the determination of homogeneity in the herbal blend.