Spray drying transforms liquid into powder form while preserving natural aromas, flavors, and nutrients. The process of turning liquids into powders not only extends the products’ shelf life, but the process also helps to inhibit microbial growth and enzymatic activity.

By converting liquids into lightweight powders, spray drying can significantly reduce transportation costs, especially for long-distance shipping, compared to transporting bulky liquid materials. This is particularly beneficial for products with high water content, where shipping costs can be a significant factor. 
Minimized waste is a benefit of the spray drying process; spray drying helps minimize waste by converting surplus or excess products into shelf stable powders, reducing the need for disposal waste.  

On the downside it is a process that requires energy input to heat the drying air that evaporates the water.

Learn more: What is spray drying?

For a product to be spray dried, it must be a pumpable liquid without large particles. Generally, the particles should be <100µm and the viscosity below 5000cp, but sometimes products above these limits can be spray dried, or below cannot. Most often the solids content in the liquid is 10-50%. If the solids content is lower the time and energy consumption is usually so high that spray drying does not make sense. Some products can be dried with a higher solids content. With a high solids content it is often the viscosity that is the limiting factor. If in doubt send us a 1 liter sample of your product and we will make a feasibility test. 

Examples of key applications of the SANOVO Horizontal Box Spray Dryer:

• Plant-based proteins: Efficiently converts protein-rich liquids into high-quality powder, ideal for nutritional supplements and food additives.
• Egg and dairy products: Transforms liquid eggs, milk or whey into stable, long-lasting powder with excellent solubility and nutrient retention, facilitating easy storage and transportation.
• Animal By-Products: Processes by-products and animal blood into valuable powders for pet food and feed ingredients with optimal nutritional profiles for pets and livestock.
• Fruits, vegetables, and novel protein sources like algae and mushrooms

The SANOVO SGA dryers are available for spray drying operations with water evaporation capacities from 50 to 2,500 liter/hour (110 to 5,500 lbs./hour).

Explore industries

A horizontal box spray dryer is often the better alternative to traditional spray drying towers for production of powder from a wide range of ingredients, food and feed products. The spray dryer is offering a number of unique benefits for you and your production process, i.e.:
Reduced building height required: Horizontal box spray dryers are generally smaller than towers and the design reduces the required building space and height significantly and thereby the overall investment in building and platforms. The space-efficient design of the horizontal box spray dryer typically makes the dryer fit into most existing buildings. 

Higher yield: Drying and integrated baghouse (filter bags) in one box reduces product loss during the powder processing
Less cleaning and longer runtime: The need for cleaning is less as the powder is kept under sanitary conditions in the box with minimum risk for bacterial growth as there are no powder conveying ducts and drying chamber is fully insulated by PU sandwich panels.
Time to market: Depending on the complexity the spray dryer can be up and running 9 months after signing the project.

Explore the SGA Spray Dryer

When estimating the ROI of the spray drying production, a starting point is to determine the production cost per kilogram of powder. 
Try to fill out our Request for Quote (RFQ) questionnaire. Based our your specifications about your liquid product and production facilities we will return with a Product Flow Diagram (PFD). It contains essential data for assessing the ROI of your powder processing investment, i.e.:  
•    Energy/power consumption per kilogram of powder
•    Operation time per. day/week
•    Powder production outlet rate (output) 

Contact us to receive the RFQ questionnaire

ATEX is explosion protection. Most organic dusts can explode if the conditions are right (or wrong).

Our box dryers have an ATEX type certificate. This is your assurance that we have done what we can to prevent the box dryer from exploding and if it does happen that the explosion is vented so that it will not harm people.

FCM is European food contact legislation. This is your assurance that the materials that come into contact with food will not contaminate the food with substances to a level that is harmful.

Learn more about ATEX

Food contact material (FCM)

 

The horizontal SGA spray dryer works by conducting heated air to the drying chamber through several tubes, in which the liquid product is sprayed though special atomizer nozzles with optimized geometry. The number of nozzles and tubes depends on the capacity of the plant.
The heated air evaporates the water, and part of the powder falls directly to the drying chamber floor. The remaining part is separated from the drying air in the bag collectors where the air is now discharged. All powder is then conveyed to the end of the chamber and removed by a transverse auger. After that, the powder packing process starts.

Explore the SGA Spray Dryer

SANOVO TECHNOLOGY PROCESS has a pilot test plant with the SANOVO SGA horizontal box spray dryers for powder processing available in the test center at our HQ in Denmark. Here your team can carry out tests on your product, develop new products and evaluate the benefits of using the SANOVO SGA spray dryer to get the best possible ingredient and protein powder. Besides testing your product, you will have experts at your side all the way.
The test dryer has a water evaporation capacity of approx. 50kg/hour so for a test we will need a minimum of 100 liter liquid product, but preferably 500-800 liter that will be enough for a day of drying. The product must be liquid, pumpable and without particles larger than 100 mµ.

In case you would like experience the SGA Spray Dryer in action, we can plan a reference visit for you at one of our existing customers’ plants. Then you can see the SGA dryer in action and learn from the experience of others.

Book time for a test trial