Designing of the dryer section of nutritional yeast production plant – Industrial sector review – Part 4

Designing of the dryer section of nutritional yeast production plant – Industrial sector review – Part 4

Spray Dryer

Spray dryers are also used for liquids and dilute slurry feeds but it can also be used to dry ‘any material that can be pumped’. As an alternate to the drum dryer, the spray dryer offers a better solution to many drying problems. Many materials (including
food products) which would suffer from thermal degradation if dried by other methods can be better processed by spray drying.

In the spray drying process, the rapid flash evaporation and its accompanying cooling effect limits the temperature of the material. The drying time is also of few seconds which helps prevent nutrients from thermal degradation. The continuous method of operation
enables large outputs. Correct application of control equipment in the spray dryer guarantees supreme quality product with low labor cost. The labor cost is low as this process does not require frequent manual handling.

A typical spray dryer can evaporate up to 10,000 kg/hr of moisture (APV dryer handbook, 2000). Moreover, spray dried vitamins are much better than roller drier products due to their superior quality and the desired size, shape and moisture content in the
end product is better controlled in spray driers (Maters,1979).

Other advantages of using spray dryer are:

Only one typical spray dryer is required to perform the duty

The desired product quality can be achieved and specifications can be met through dryer design

Gives more operational flexibility, good control of particle size

Minimal loss to nutritional value of product

Adoptable in complete automatic control and continues process (Maters,1979).

Continued in part 5

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Posted by Ahmed Tariq on Feb 24 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry