Over the last years, continuous manufacturing has created significant interest in the pharmaceutical industry. Continuous filtration at low flow rates and high solid loadings poses, however, a significant challenge. A commercially available, continuously operating, dynamic cross-flow filtration device (CFF) is tested and characterized. It is shown that the CFF is a highly suitable technology for continuous filtration. For all tested model active pharmaceutical ingredients, a material-specific strictly linear relationship between feed and permeate rate is identified. Moreover, for each tested substance, a constant concentration factor is reached. A one-parameter model based on a linear equation is suitable to fully describe the CFF filtration performance. This rather unexpected finding and the concentration polarization layer buildup is analyzed and a basic model to describe the observed filtration behavior is developed. (c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. a

• Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering (RCPE)
• Novartis Pharma AG Basel
• Graz University of Technology

• API
• Modeling

1. API
2. continuous manufacturing
3. cross-flow filtration
4. drying
5. mathematical model
6. membrane filtration
7. modeling
8. modeling concentration polarization layer
9. Processing
10. Research Article
11. separation science
12. small-scale
13. unit operations