Scalable Acoustic Microscopy for Pharmaceutical Applications

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Various containers, such as glass vials and plastic bags, are used in large quantities by the pharmaceuticalindustry to manufacture and distribute sterile products. Structural weaknesses or defects in these containers cancompromise the integrity of the pharmaceutical products. When detected during the manufacturing phase,compromised products have to be discarded and result in significant monetary losses. When they goundetected, compromised products jeopardize patient safety. As a result, manufacturers of pharmaceuticalproducts and suppliers of glass or plastic containers invest significant efforts to control the quality of containersand packaged products, before, during and after the manufacturing process. Many of the most important classesof defects are difficult to detect with conventional methods, such as optical inspection. Examples includehairline cracks or voids in the walls of glass vials, voids in plastic bag seals, glass vial walls or plastic bags thatare too thin, and small glass particles mixed with the pharmaceutical product inside glass vials. The industry istherefore looking for other inspection technologies that could provide quality information which is orthogonalto what is provided by optical methods, to better detect hard-to-find defects. The main research challenges to beaddressed through the project therefore include the use of quality control technologies for pharmaceuticalcontainers based on acoustic microscopy, which have high sensitivity to defects, low false positive rates, andwhich are fast enough for high-volume manufacturing.