The main manufacturing routes of pharmaceutical solid dosage forms are direct compression, wet granulation and dry granulation. Each of these starts with feeding of the individual components, followed by blending to create a homogeneous blend. Hence blending is an essential step during solid dosage form manufacturing.

To improve product quality as well as to allow flexible and cost-effective manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry is switching from batch-wise to continuous manufacturing where starting materials are continuously fed into the process, while the finished products are continuously removed from the process at the same rate to maintain a constant hold-up mass in the system.

Taking this transition from batch-wise to continuous manufacturing into account, it is essential to replace the currently available batch-wise blender by a continuous linear dry powder blender to be able to continue to perform relevant research with the field of solid dosage forms.