Construction of a quality index for granules produced by fluidized bed technology and application of the correspondence analysis as a discriminant procedure.

The production of granules by wet granulation in a fluidized bed was assessed after the construction of a quality index based on a file of attributes (relevant factors). These attributes are combined by a methodology relying on Correspondence Analysis, as a discriminant procedure, using two extreme simulated active vectors representing, respectively, the best and the worst cases for the granules quality output ("bad" and "good" pole). From those, a single continuous synthetic variable - the quality index - can be produced referring to a more significant set of samples.