Foaming characteristics of sugar- and polyvinylpyrrolidone-alcohol solutions during vacuum foam drying: A rheological approach

Vacuum foam drying offers great perspectives to formulate solid-state encapsulated active drugs. Taking into account the specific need of pharmaceutical formulations to keep drug molecules active and dispersed, we show in this paper that vacuum drying of pharmaceutical formulations can be substantially improved by using original rheological approaches. Typically, our formulations totally dried-up in less than 5 min, a delay much shorter than the long hours of the traditional vacuum drying process. Steady-shear rheology was used to evaluate the solution's specific viscosity against the solutions’ concentrations, in order to correlate the dilution regime to the foamabiltiy. This rheological approach indicated that in miscible solutions, spontaneous foaming occurred in the semi-dilute entangled regime, near the transition to the concentrated regime; for partially miscible solutions, it occurred in solutions at a concentration near to the percolation concentration. The proposed methodology is versatile, and should provide a simple way to assess the foamability of pharmaceutical formulations.