Continuous manufacturing has become a realistic option in the pharmaceutical industry. As such, process design becomes more complicated where this new option is actively investigated. This paper discusses the continuous manufacturing of solid drug products from the process systems engineering perspectives. After summarizing the merits and the challenges of continuous manufacturing, we introduce several research examples in the authors’ research group. Firstly, economic performance and product quality were compared with conventional batch manufacturing. Experimental studies were then performed to obtain practical knowledge of continuous manufacturing. Lastly, a comprehensive process design framework was proposed, using superstructure and activity modeling approaches. In conclusion, appropriate cooperation between simulations and experiments plays a key role in decision-making, including selection between batch and continuous manufacturing.

In recent years, data “generation” techniques using generative adversarial networks (GANs), in which multiple neural networks learn in an adversarial manner, have achieved remarkable results in many fields. The authors are participating in a project commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) called the “Artificial Intelligence Future Agriculture Creation Project” and are working on the development of automatic diagnosis of plants based on images and related technologies. In this paper, we introduce the trend of automatic diagnosis technology for plant diseases, the unique difficulties of this task, and the remarkable effect of GAN’s image generation technology on it.

It is important to evaluate not only the particle dispersion state in a slurry but also its particle packing ability in order to control the green density for ceramic sheet casting process. Thus, we investigated the particle packing ability of BaTiO₃ aqueous slurries by using gravitational and centrifugal sedimentation test. Besides a drying test of the slurries was conducted, where the packing fraction of dried particle bed was determined by mass balance. It was found that the density of green sheet could be well predicted by gravitational sedimentation test and the drying test, while the centrifugal sedimentation could not predict it. Therefore, it was suggested that drying test of the slurry should be suitable for quick prediction of green density for ceramics sheet casting process.

The ABC powder used for a fire extinguisher shows high flowability. The evaluation about a flowability of such powder was very difficult and was not able to show the difference in the property by the measurement of the existing repose angle. Then, in this study, we considered about a new evaluation method of the powdery flowability indicating the high flowability using ABC powder. That rotated a cylindrical container after the tapping, and an angle when powder collapsed was measured and was named the rotational collapse angle. As a result, the rotational collapse angle was able to clarify a flowable difference for high flowable powders such as the ABC powder. Furthermore, it was found that the rotational collapse angle could determine with the right and wrong of the emission test of the fire extinguisher beforehand.