Novel method to weigh medical capsules in continuous process

In pharmaceutical companies, there are limitations on using a weighing machine to control the amount of medicines filled in all capsules for a continuous process. Conventionally, a bulk of medical capsules (not every capsule) are sampled off-line for quality control. However, an effective medical treatment requires that patients should take the proper dose from each medical capsule. To overcome obstacles, a novel method to weigh medical capsules is proposed to determine the weight of all the medical capsules in the production line for a larger number and higher flow rate. In this paper, a theoretical analysis of the proposed methodology reveals the principles in system design. The traveling time of the capsule within a vertical tube depends upon the mass of the capsule for a given pressure difference between the two ends of the tube. A real prototype of an electro-pneumatic system is implemented to show the viability of the proposed methodology in practical uses.