Tablets are the most common dosage form employed by the pharmaceutical industry. They are both inexpensive to produce and convenient to patients. Active pharmaceutical ingredients, particularly those incorporated into innovator company products, are new chemical substances whose chemical and physical properties are incompletely known and are sometimes present in large amounts in the manufactured products. Excipients present in the formulation can, at least partially, offset undesirable properties of active ingredient. Successful tablet formulations must, in addition to having desirable medicinal properties, must be manufacturable. In order to be manufacturable tablets must have sufficient tensile strength to survive handling, processing and packaging. In this paper the tensile strength of common pharmaceutical excipients mixed with sodium dodecyl sulfate is investigated. Sodium dodecyl sulfate, if incorporated into formulations, usually has an undesirable effect on tensile strength. A model, based on adhesion science principles is proposed that allows the tensile strength of candidate formulations to be calculated from the Ryshkewitch-Duckworth parameters of the component materials. Both the model and the Ryshkewitch-Duckworth equation suggest that tablet porosity is the principal measure of the outcome of the tableting process. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011