Effects of Feed Shoe Wheel Speed on Tablet Weight Variability
In many manufacturing industries, e.g. powder metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, ceramics and foodstuff, die compaction is widely applied. Although die filling has attracted increasing attention recently, very few published studies are available to predict powder flow rate from a moving feed shoe to dies. In this research, a feed shoe with three wheels of a high-speed rotary tablet press was studied. The powder discharge rates from the feed shoe and the tablet weight variability at different feeding wheel paddle speeds were investigated experimentally and numerically. The results of the two methods were in good agreement. According to the experimental results, the minimum deviation of tablet weight was obtained at the speed of 60 rpm. However, the wheel speed of 55 rpm was likely to be the better one on account of the calculations, which will be studied in the future experiments.