Estimation of bottle filling counts for conventional pharmaceutical tablets and capsules

Abstract

A method has been developed using commonly available data for estimating the number of tablets or hard shell capsules that can be filled into bottles. The single unit volumes of conventional pharmaceutical biconvex tablets and capsules can be calculated from simple geometric relationships, which then can be used to determine the packing fraction of the units in bottles. The packing fractions of capsules and tablets studied in this work ranged from 0.53 to 0.63 and 0.56 to 0.62, respectively, and were dependent on bottle size and shape. This method can be used to assess a variety of packaging configurations computationally during drug product development.

• Bottle
• capsule
• density
• packing fraction
• solid fraction
• tablet

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Doug Pearce, Lisa Wilson, Bill Ketterhagen and Bruno Hancock (Pfizer Inc) for their review of this work and guidance.

Declarations of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.