A Pohlhausen solution for the mass flux from a multi-layered compact in the USP drug dissolution apparatus

The analytical simulation of the dissolution of drug-containing compacts in a stirred non-reactive medium in the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) drug dissolution apparatus is presented. This is of interest to the design of drug delivery systems in which the goal is to design single and multi-layered compacts which release the drug according to certain desired release profiles. A Pohlhausen solution of the concentration boundary layer equations is presented and results are compared to experimental measurements. Good agreement with experiment is achieved for single component and multi-component layered compacts.