Continuous Crystallisation

Continuous crystallisation offers the potential for flexible and effective control of particle attributes to achieve improved performance in formulation and final product application. This chapter provides a general overview of key principles and modes of crystallisation relevant to continuous crystallisation of pharmaceuticals. There is a need to develop and apply: effective methods for gathering experimental physical data, quickly from limited material and useful modelling tools to support process development and control. There are various crystallisation approaches that can be used to achieve effective purification and isolation of solids from solution including reactive, evaporative, anti-solvent (or drown-out) and cooling. Process analytical technology (PAT) has been specifically applied for crystallisation where temperature, concentration and supersaturation can be measured in the solution phase and particle size and shape, size distribution, polymorphic composition and the extent of agglomeration or breakage can be measured in the solid phase using a number of different methods.