ConsiGma FC Flex - Mark Rowland explains

I'm here to introduce you to the new ConsiGma FC Flex Tablet Coater, part of the family of tablet coaters that we have within GEA. Over to the right, you can see the CFC lab. That's the machine that we use for development of coated tablets. And across here on the left-hand side is the CFC Flex, which is our production machine. The critical benefit of the ConsiGma range of tablet coaters is that we have geometric parity between the two machines. As we move from the lab machine into the production machine, only the depth of the wheel increases, and that means we're able to very easily go from a lab scale through to a production scale with almost zero scale-up work. You can see that the FC lab is designed for very manual operations. We manually load the tablets into that machine, we carry out a coating process, and then we discharge manually from them. Contrary to that, if you look at the CFC Flex, we have the ability for fully automated loading, either by vacuum transfer or via robotics. Also to discharge, we come out of the bottom of the machine and again into either tablet conditioning equipment or directly into vacuum transfer over to a finished product IBC. We've already introduced the FC lab into the discussion. That machine has a capability of between 0.5 kilograms and 1.5 kilograms. That runs in a batch time of just six minutes and giving us the capability to run a whole design of experiments just within the morning. Now, when we come across into the FC Flex, we're able to increase that batch size right the way up to nine kilograms. The other key feature of the Flex is that we're able to change the size of the drum. Here you can see the machine is fitted with a 480-millimeter drum, but we're also able to fit it with a 320 millimeter or a 160 millimeter, giving us a big range of batch capabilities. So alongside the changing drum depth, we also have a modular spray lance, and you can see here it's fitted with the three spray nozzles. When we change the bed depth, we then reduce the number of nozzles in a modular format. So with 160-millimeter wheel, we just have a single nozzle. So the loading equipment is based up in this upper panel here, and as I said, we can either work through vacuum transfer or through robotic transfer. When we're discharging a load into the machine, the tablets then come through this front port here, down through the door, and out through this directly into the drum. At the end of the batch, when we want to discharge the coated tablets, this bowl here will tip down and rotate, and that allows the tablets to fall out of the drum and down through the discharge and then come down to the panel below here, where we either have tablets, conditioning equipment, or we can directly vacuum transfer away from the machine to an end product handling system. So come to visit us at CPhI Milan. We're here all week. Thank you.