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How to measure and analyse the texture of food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and adhesives.

Tuesday 24 July 2018

Viscoelasticity in the Pharmaceutical and Cosmetics Industries

Looking through a gel capsule
Many pharmaceutical and cosmetic products have viscoelastic properties that can be measured using a Texture Analyser.

Pharmaceutical tablets show viscoelastic stress-strain behaviour when the powder compact is being loaded and unloaded, and this behaviour continues once the load has been fully removed. This can cause problems for tablet manufacturers such as capping, when either the upper or lower part of the tablet separates from the main body when ejected from the press or during the handling process. 


Viscoelastic properties are functions of the compression conditions as well as the formulation. It is important to investigate every instance of capping to ensure the problem is not repeated (which is very costly) and to measure the viscoelastic properties of new formulations before they reach the mass manufacturing stage.