PharmaPy: An object-oriented tool for the development of hybrid pharmaceutical flowsheets

Process design and optimization continue to provide computational challenges as the chemical engineering and process optimization communities seek to address more complex and larger scale applications. Software tools for digital design and flowsheet simulation are readily available for traditional chemical processing applications such as in commodity chemicals and hydrocarbon processing; however, tools for pharmaceutical manufacturing are much less well developed. This paper introduces, PharmaPy, a Python-based modelling platform for pharmaceutical manufacturing systems design and optimization. The versatility of the platform is demonstrated in simulation and optimization of both continuous and batch processes. The structure and features of a Python-based modeling platform, PharmaPy are presented. Illustrative examples are shown to highlight key features of the platform and framework.

Pulsed Multiphase Flows—Numerical Investigation of Particle Dynamics in Pulsating Gas–Solid Flows at Elevated Temperatures

Although the benefits of pulsating multiphase flows and the concomitant opportunity to intensify heat and mass transfer processes for, e.g., drying, extraction or chemical reactions have been known for some time, the industrial implementation is still limited. This is particularly due to the lack of understanding of basic influencing factors, such as amplitude and frequency of the pulsating flow and the resulting particle dynamics. The pulsation generates oscillation of velocity, pressure, and temperature, intensifying the heat and mass transfer by a factor of up to five compared to stationary gas flow. With the goal of process intensification and targeted control of sub-processes or even the development of completely new processing routes for the formation, drying or conversion of particulate solids in pulsating gas flows as utilized in, e.g., pulse combustion drying or pulse combustion spray pyrolysis, the basic understanding of occurring transport processes is becoming more and more important. In the presented study, the influence of gas-flow conditions and particle properties on particle dynamics as well as particle residence time and the resulting heat and mass transfer in pulsating gas–solid flows are investigated.

Application of Transformation Matrices to the Solution of Population Balance Equations

The development of algorithms and methods for modelling flowsheets in the field of granular materials has a number of challenges. The difficulties are mainly related to the inhomogeneity of solid materials, requiring a description of granular materials using distributed parameters. To overcome some of these problems, an approach with transformation matrices can be used. This allows one to quantitatively describe the material transitions between different classes in a multidimensional distributed set of parameters, making it possible to properly handle dependent distributions. This contribution proposes a new method for formulating transformation matrices using population balance equations (PBE) for agglomeration and milling processes. The finite volume method for spatial discretization and the second-order Runge–Kutta method were used to obtain the complete discretized form of the PBE and to calculate the transformation matrices. The proposed method was implemented in the flowsheet modelling framework Dyssol to demonstrate and prove its applicability. Hence, it was revealed that this new approach allows the modelling of complex processes involving materials described by several interconnected distributed parameters, correctly taking into consideration their interdependency.