Theoretical Modeling and Numerical Simulation of Spray Drying Processes

Particle formation technologies are utilized today in many areas, including pharmaceutical, medical and biomedical, biotechnology, chemical, optical and optoelectronic, cosmetic, printing, painting, ceramics, materials design, nutrition, and for other applications. Spray drying is one of the widely used processes for producing small particles by rapid moisture evaporation from a spray of droplets. Spray drying involves multiphase transport phenomena between drying agent, droplets and particles, and chamber boundaries. These transport phenomena occur on multiple scales because of simultaneous external and internal heat and mass transfer in each phase. Therefore, purely experimental studies would be insufcient and would not encompass all the basic physical processes, predict parametric behavior, and optimize the power consumption of spray drying. On the other hand, realistic modeling and numerical simulation of spray drying are highly demanding tasks for engineers in designing spray dryer systems and in choosing suitable operating conditions.