Introduction

Handling pharmaceutical tablets, or other fragile food products, continues to be plagued with ergonomic disadvantages. Many, many plants today are still lifting, scooping and dumping cores and tablets and living with the inefficiencies and ergonomic issues inherent to manual, repetitive motions.

The manual handling of fragile products, in small containers, stems from various and legitimate issues associated with preventing product damage and dealing with other quality assurance issues. However, it is now possible to handle these fragile products in a completely automated and “hands off” fashion, using dense phase vacuum conveying.