Torrens Sotomayor, Luis Francisco

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    Dried Puerto Rican sweet potato (i>Ipomoea batatas) and breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) particles for tablet compaction
    (2022-07-07) Torrens Sotomayor, Luis Francisco; Velázquez Figueroa, Carlos; College of Engineering; Cardona Martínez, Nelson; Chávez Jáuregui, Rosa N.; Department of Chemical Engineering; Morales Payán, Jose P.
    The manufacturing sector in Puerto Rico has been severely affected every time an atmospheric event or problems at the marine docks occur. This is because their raw material mostly comes from foreign industries. An alternative is to encourage self-sustaining strategies to produce these ingredients using local resources. Developing novel ingredients from local crops can be an alternative for industries such as the pharmaceutical sector since there is vast experience of these products in food sector industries, provides nutritional benefit to the patient, and promotes the creation of new drugs. Within the pharmaceutical industry, these foods are used for their extraction and use of starch in current formulations. However, there is a lack of information on implementing all the food components for creating a tablet. This thesis is focused on using all the compounds of local sweet potato and breadfruit in the preparation of particles and tablets. This is to evaluate the feasibility of compacting these particles and can meet the criteria of an acceptable tablet imposed by the United States Pharmacopeia. For this, the effect of varying the type of raw material (sweet potato and breadfruit), the method of cutting the raw material (cubes and slices), the addition of a binder to the formulation (0% and 2% PVP), and different compression forces (4, 6, and 8 MT) were studied to understand their effect on the tablet thickness and weight variation, friability, hardness, disintegration time, and dissolution profile. To understand the correlation between the variables, analysis between results was done using the Fisher LSD Method test with a 95% confidence. Among the studies carried out on the formulations, it was observed that the particle size distribution of both formulations was more dispersed to smaller particle sizes (sweet potato D50 ≈ 420 µm and breadfruit D50≈120-200 µm), which limited their flow behavior. The studies included the material particle size distribution, density, morphology, moisture content, powder rheological analysis, water activity, porosity, pH, colorimetry, and functional properties. Sweet potato tablets with 2% of PVP agglomerate met the acceptance value for the friability test, while the rest of the formulations had values of weight loss values less than 2%. All tablets had a hardness above the minimum acceptance target. The disintegration times of the sweet potato and breadfruit tablets were less than 20 and 6 minutes, respectively. The behavior of the dissolution profiles was as expected and the equilibrium time for the sweet potato and breadfruit tablets was from 14 to 28 minutes and 9 to 14 minutes, respectively. General results showed that the compression force and agglomerate percentage had a significant effect on the tablet performance while the cutting of the raw material only presented changes in the disintegration time and dissolution profile. The results obtained by the tablet characterizations show that sweet potato and breadfruit particles are good candidates for novel excipients for immediate-release tablets. The next steps include the evaluation of the chemical composition of the final material, evaluating a particle size increase method to the process, and study variations to the formulation (e.g. Mixtures between food or addition of API). Knowledge from particle behavior can be used to implement these particles into automatic compression process and for continuous manufacturing lines. The findings of this research are the foundations for evaluating these products for tablet novel excipients and can help reduce import and transportation costs, minimize storage dependency, and even be evaluated as an emergency food source.