Additive Manufacturing as a Rapid Prototyping and Fabrication Tool for Laboratory Crystallizers─A Proof-of-Concept Study

Abstract

While large-scale crystallizer design profits from many years of accumulated knowledge, traditional fabrication technologies limit the possibilities for easy and rapid lab-scale design, fabrication, and subsequently testing of crystallizer design variants. Additive manufacturing (three-dimensional (3D) printing) affords an opportunity to overcome the challenges associated with scaling down equipment using traditional fabrication technologies and materials of construction such as glass or metal alloys. Moreover, additive manufacturing provides flexibility in design and the ability to rapidly redesign and prototype novel designs, limited, perhaps, only by the suitability of available materials of construction. Surprisingly, this technology has not yet found widespread use in crystallizer design. In this contribution, we present a concept study for a 3D-printed prototype crystallizer. We discuss additive manufacturing as a tool for rapid design and fabrication of down-scaled crystallizers based upon a design using the classic Oslo-type crystallizer as a starting point. The initial crystallizer design and fabrication process, subsequent design modifications, and investigation of the crystallizer characteristics are discussed here with a view to applications in pharmaceutical continuous crystallization.