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The power of simulation in designing a pharmaceutical manufacturing process

The pharmaceutical industry will face many challenges over the next decade, from industry-wide trends to new operational pressures. The key to meeting these challenges is adopting an agile, scalable, and efficient approach to drug discovery and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The power of simulation in designing a pharmaceutical manufacturing process is due to the unique and detailed information it can provide for many operations. Learn more in this detailed white paper about computational tools that accurately model the physics required by the pharmaceutical industry.

Pharmaceutical modeling

Accurate pharmaceutical modeling provides vital insight into the complex phenomena taking place within reactors and other process equipment, yielding information on features such as species and temperature distribution and enabling design exploration to optimize performance and achieve savings. There are also several models that can be used for simulating multiphase systems, however, each is situation-specific with explicit sets of assumptions.

CFD-DEM simulation in the pharmaceutical industry

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element method (DEM) offer pharmaceutical manufacturers new insights into unit operations, improving efficiency and reducing development time. DEM is a numerical method to compute particulate motion and has been extended to capture interparticle heat transfer and chemical reactions. These physics-based simulation methodologies can help address these needs and have offered manufacturers in the pharmaceutical industry valuable insights to improve process efficiency and product quality. However, greater value can be achieved by integrating these methods within an open network of data transfer to create a digital representation of products and processes: a comprehensive digital twin.

Streamlining pharmaceutical operations

This physics-based simulation technology potentially bridges the R&D development teams together with operations. In this role, computational chemistry, advanced process systems models, 3D simulations, and reduced-order models combine to create a virtual realization of product and process. There is an industry-wide desire to increase efficiency and there is a drive to enhance process understanding so that product quality can be ensured based on the quality of the process itself. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies to streamline pharmaceutical operations and realize optimizations is vital to exploring the possibilities of design and operation.

Download this white paper to learn how a digital twin could be a boon to the pharmaceutical industry, facilitating confident process scale-up, optimized equipment design and operation, and faster time-to-market.

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