Baby dry

The process of spray drying is widely used in the food industry for the production of various powders such as milk powder or soy powder. NIZO food research has over 50 years of experience in developing solutions to optimize the spray drying and particle agglomeration process. It was exactly for this reason that a Ukraine based infant food company contacted NIZO to help them with their residence time and fouling problems and to assess the risk of explosion in their facilities.

Better tasting product with lower production costs!
NIZO’s scientists visited the production site of the company, and with the data they obtained there, they modeled the dryer with advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Using the model, NIZO’s scientists advised a change to the basic outline of the dryer. This resulted in a different flow pattern, and an improved residence time of the powder particles in the dryer. The outlet temperature of the dryer could also be decreased, which resulted in a product with better properties with respect to taste and nutritional value, but also with respect to fouling, which was entirely solved!

Working together at the production site
“This project not only took us to an interesting part of the world,” Coen Akkerman, project leader at NIZO remarks, “but it was again a nice example of NIZO’s expertise in combining knowledge of processing with functionality and quality of the product.”

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