Drug tablet thickness estimations using air-coupled acoustics

A non-contact/non-destructive acoustic technique for predicting the coating layer thickness of a drug tablet is presented. Quality of tablet coatings can play a major role in the effectiveness of drug delivery. Many pharmaceutical tablets consist of a tablet core and a coated outer cover. Variations in the tablet coating can be indicative of various process problems and, therefore, is of a concern for quality assurance. In the current non-contact measurement system, an air-coupled excitation and laser interferometric detection for predicting the coating layer thickness of a drug tablet is introduced. Drug tablets with different coating thicknesses are vibrated via an acoustic field generated by an air-coupled transducer in a frequency range sufficiently high to excite their several vibrational modes. The tablet surface vibrational responses are acquired at a number of measurement points by a laser interferometer in a non-contact manner. An iterative computational procedure, based on the FE method and Newton's method, was developed and demonstrated to extract the coating layer thicknesses of the tablets from a subset of the measured resonance frequencies.