1. Prof. Guillermo Carpintero
Photonics-based Wideband Spectroscopy System for pharmaceutical tablet manufacturing process monitoring
Prof. Guillermo Carpintero

2. Challenges in pharmaceutical tablet manufacturing process monitoring
After tabletting or de-dusting and metal detector
Before the sealing station
After the sealing station
Tablet composition:
Tablet Porosity, Moisture content, crystallin structure
Mix-up avoidance:
Identify Mixture of different pills in a common blister, through identification of API contents
Packaging integrity:
Blister Leak Test (Sealing)
Production Speed

3. Addressing these challenges through . . . . . . Terahertz spectroscopy
Current THz spectroscopy systems are generally based in Time Domain Spectroscopy (TDS, Pulsed) based on a femtosecond pulse laser, having demonstrated THz chemical imaging (TCI) systems.
A TDS system is usually composed of a 9-fs near-infrared pulse laser, two gallium arsenide photoconductive antennas, a mechanical stage delay line, and mirrors. The delay line is a key element, used to obtain a time-domain waveform, which is converted to a frequency-domain spectrum by Fourier transformation
The 3-dimensional translational stage allows to obtain a THz time-domain spectrum at each point in a sample.
The acquisition time for obtaining a 12 × 12 mm image is about 7 hours.
The image consists of 60 × 60 pixels in 200-μm increments.
Femtosecond lasers are expensive sources
This scheme is very difficult to miniaturize, especially certain components, such as delay lines.
In contrast, the CW method is less challenging to reduce the size of components because all components from the laser diodes to the THz emitter, receiver, and optical waveguides can be fabricated on chip by using common photonic integration technologies.

4. On-chip Terahertz Spectrometer engine
Photonic-based Terahertz generation . . .
. . . Using photonic integration
Photonic-based Terahertz spectroscopy
Using mature photonic integration technology, we will miniaturize a Terahertz-Frequency Domain Spectroscopy (THz- FDS) system, we aim at prototyping an on-chip Terahertz (THz) Spectrometer to enable:
Introducing these components into pharmaceutical tablet manufacturing machines for in-line/on-line monitoring
Provide enhanced stability and reliability to the spectroscopy system.
Significantly reduce the cost of the system (<30k €).
On-chip Terahertz Spectrometer engine