Aplicación de la simulación en el desarrollo de tabletas comprimidas de hidroclorotiazida para el tratamiento de la hipertensión

Hypertension affects 34.23% of the venezuelan population, which is why computer simulation was applied in the development of compressed hydrochlorothiazide tablets. In the development of these Pharmaceutical Forms, a preliminary experimental study was carried out consisting of three batches, made in triplicate. The compressed tablets obtained were evaluated for variation in weight, thickness, hardness or breaking strength, friability, disintegration time and speed of dissolution. With these results, the simulation model was created in the Arena version 14.5® simulator, after which the solid-liquid mixing bottleneck was established as a unit operation, based on this, three possible scenarios were created. Then, it was selected as the best scenario to be verified experimentally which eliminated the bottleneck and it was established that the solid-liquid mixing had to be carried out in the Erweka® Sigma mixer at a speed of 350 rpm for a time of 8 minutes. The results of the computer simulation of the best scenario indicated that 88% of the properties of the tablets were within the desired range for them, in addition to eliminating the bottleneck. When performing the experimental verification, 88.89% of the properties of compressed tablets were obtained within the desired limits, generating a percentage of error in the prediction of the simulation of 1.01%. Therefore, it was possible to develop hydrochlorothiazide compressed tablets by applying computer simulation, reducing the time and costs used.