Pressing the Perfect Dishwasher Tablet

We all think of Tablet Presses in the context of pharmaceuticals or supplement manufacture, but there are many other products that a wide variety of businesses produce using the humble tablet press. In this blog we look at the manufacturer of dishwasher tablets, using tablet presses.

Previously a luxury, a dishwasher is now commonplace on most homes in Europe and the US, and they all use products in tablet or sachet form to produce clean dishes.

While the main ingredient of a dishwasher tablet is essentially detergent, the average dishwasher tablet consists of a mixture of sodium and potassium salts, surfactants, filler agents, and fragrance.

This mixture is compressed into the familiar oblong blocks using a tablet press.

What equipment do you need to make dishwasher tablets?

The market trend for dishwasher tablets is strongly biased towards a multi-layer product, although budget tablets can be single layer. While a specialist dishwasher tablet press will be purpose build to produce dishwasher tablets at mass production volumes, a rotary tablet press is capable producing high quality multi-layer tablets with the right tooling.
In order to produce a multilayer tablet, a machine that is able to press tablets to an accurate and repeatable pressure is required.

An accurate pressing process is a must to make sure all layers are kept intact and will avoid errors in layer weight control. Poor layer weight control may cause layer separation and delamination and this will affect the final quality of the tablet.

The process of making multi-layer dishwasher tablets is a fine balance between the tooling pressure active ingredients, fillers and binders to ensure even layers that do not exhibit a tendency to delamination.