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K. KHANKARI and K. M. Dhanasekharan. Fluent Inc., 10 Cavendish Court, Lebanon, NH 03766 There is a growing interest in incorporating nutraceutical ingredients such as antioxidants, phytochemicals into food formulations. There is also a growing need for true control release of flavors. Microencapsulation technologies provide a means to achieve these goals. Spray drying is the most commonly used encapsulation system. Spray drying is a complex process and the effectiveness of the encapsulation depends on several inter-related design and operating parameters. Experimental evaluation and optimization of all these parameters is not only expensive, time consuming, and inadequate but sometimes impossible. The main objective of this paper is to understand and optimize the spray drying process for microencapsulation. The computational model employed in this analysis involves numerical models for airflow, heat transfer between the particulates and the air, and mass transfer including the vaporization of the solvent. This analysis predicted three-dimensional distribution of airflow patterns along with the resulting trajectories of particles in the dryer chamber and its residence time distribution. In addition, this model also predicted the distribution of evaporated solvent mass fractions, air temperature and particle temperature. A sensitivity analysis of various operating parameters was performed to understand the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the spray drying process for encapsulation. The developed model will be helpful to scientists and engineers to understand process robustness, encapsulant stability and to scale-up from lab/ pilot scale to production scale.
Session 111, Food Engineering: Modeling heat transfer and microbial inactivation
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