A novel method to quantify tablet disintegration

One of the aims in the food industry is to produce fast dissolving products. The dissolution of tablets in water is often accompanied with disintegration which is the process of breaking up the tablet into smaller fragments. Disintegration increases the dissolution rate by increasing the surface area available for dissolution to occur. Such a process is helped by the use of disintegrants which are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. m of this work is to investigate whether disintegrants could be introduced in a food system to improve the overall reconstitution of food powders. For this purpose, a food grade disintegrant was selected to be introduced into tablets of maltodextrin which is a food model product. To provide further understanding of the disintegration process, a novel characterization method has been developed. It combines the implementation of a new experimental setup based on a flow cell, where images of the disintegration process are captured, together with the use of an image analysis programme. This approach allows the determination of both the tablet dimensions and the size of the disintegrates, i.e. the particles released during disintegration, with time. Such knowledge is important in identifying the stages of the reconstitution process when the disintegrantʹs action becomes effective. sults based on the system described above show that particles released in the presence of disintegrants are not only more important in number, but also their mean size is larger. This results in the fact that maltodextrin tablets are reduced in size faster in presence of disintegrants, up to 20% in this case.