Development and beyond: Strategy for long-term maintenance of an online laser diffraction particle size method in a spray drying manufacturing process

• Insitec and Mastersizer demonstrate different sensitivities to material properties.
• Care must be taken when comparing particle size distributions across instruments.
• Insitec provides a vast amount of information unavailable by offline analysis.
• Insitec is useful for real-time process diagnostics in spray-drying operations.

The purpose of this manuscript is to present the intended use and long-term maintenance strategy of an online laser diffraction particle size method used for process control in a spray drying process. A Malvern Insitec was used for online particle size measurements and a Malvern Mastersizer was used for offline particle size measurements. The two methods were developed in parallel with the Mastersizer serving as the reference method. Despite extensive method development across a range of particle sizes, the two instruments demonstrated different sensitivities to material and process changes over the product lifecycle. This paper will describe the procedure used to ensure consistent alignment of the two methods, thus allowing for continued use of online real-time laser diffraction as a surrogate for the offline system over the product lifecycle.

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