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Tablets & Capsules April 2016 29 R coating The advantages of interchangeable drums for tablet coating systems James Hahn Thomas Engineering This article gives examples of how using a coating system with interchangeable drums simplifies production increases, preserves capital, and makes better use of floor space. &D and pilot-scale coating systems have used inter- changeable drums for more than 25 years, including a 24- inch-diameter lab-scale system that my company intro- duced in 1990 [1]. Ten years ago, we extended the interchangeable-drum concept to production-scale equip- ment [2]. As a result, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals can coat as few as 100 tablets in the lab and use similar equipment to coat production batches as large as 1,200 liters (900 kilograms). Whatever their size, systems that use interchangeable coating drums are widely accepted and provide many advantages over systems that use fixed-sized drums. In a pro- duction setting, the key benefit is the larger range of capaci- ties, meaning your coating operation is no longer limited to the traditional turndown ratios of 2-to-1, 3-to-1, or 4-to-1 (maximum-to-minimum capacity). Rather, with interchange- able drums, the turndown ratios increase to 10-to-1 or bet-