Low-shear wet granulation process: new strategies in design and manufacturing of granular materials

Wet granulation is a size enlargement process used in many fields, such as pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, zootechnical, etc., due its ability to improve technological properties of the final product, compared to the powder form, and/or to realize suitable delivery systems for functional molecules for oral administrations and food preparations, and/or to produce intermediate processing products. In spite of its widespread use, economic importance and almost 50 years of research, granulates manufacture is still based on an empirical approach. Moreover, phenomena involved in powders aggregation are not well understood, and thus several experimental tests are needed to successfully obtain a customized product. In the scientific literature the approach to the granulation study is based either on experimental tests or on modeling. The two approaches are rarely applied together. In this study a novel integrated strategy of investigation, based on coupling the rational planning of experimental tests with the physical-mathematical modeling, constituted an efficacious approach to optimize the studied process and lay the foundations to implement a new granulation process from the bench scale to the industrial scale, for manufacturing granular materials with tailored features without extensive experimental tests