Encapsulation Basics – Capsules Loading and Rectification
The US Patent of 1959 for Capsule Filling (granted to Henry Greer, Robert Hompe and Jack Martell of Philadelphia, PA) signifies a great advancement in commercial production of Automatic Encapsulation. However, the most challenging and difficult step of the encapsulation process i.e. the Rectification of the Empty Hard Gelatin Capsules was simplified by another American Hugh McKnight, Indianapolis in 1988 by inventing a mechanism which converts randomly oriented two-piece capsules to an ordered array of capsules all of which has the body portion oriented in the same direction.
We all know that the Encapsulation essentially requires the capsule Cap and Body to be separated before we go on to filling the dose in the body. The earlier practiced mechanisms included a hopper for holding the empty capsules, which oscillated back and forth. The advancement in the process allowed the vertically reciprocating feeder extract the empty capsules from the feeder hopper and arrange them in a randomly formed linear arrays.
The process reorients each array of capsules (from random to linear order) with the help of a Slot, and Turning action and Ejection. The slot essentially has a Wider portion and a Narrow portion, which are so situated near the feeder such that capsules are received in the Wider portion, turns the capsule such that the Body is oriented to the Narrower portion of the slot and Cap stay oriented towards the Wider portion. The ejection mechanism pushes the Cap of the capsule such that it gets ejected from the narrow side of the slot. Thus a capsule is finally ejected vertically such that the Cap is always up and Body is always down.
To know more about the Technical Details Or Dos and Don'ts of effective Capsule Filling send an email at:
jicon.sales@jicon.com
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