A 5-Minute Screening Method for Incoming Raw Materials in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Normal quality control procedures involve accepting a “lot” of a raw material from a supplier and then performing a series of tests to determine if the material is suitable for use in a manufacturing process. For the drug manufacturing industry, this is a critical and time-consuming step. Principally, organic molecules generate absorption band spectra that are quite specific to each compound, actually creating a “fingerprint”. This application note defines a system for testing samples in less than 5 minutes using the PLC-11M reflectance prism cell, Buck Scientific Model IR System and GRAMS®/IR software.