Spray drying is the mechanism of processing fluid into dry matter by spraying the fluid into a hot dry medium particularly as hot gas. The line of action comes into play as an atomizer breaks down the fluid into droplets of the right size and disperses them into the drying medium. The dispersed droplets mix with the hot dry gas. 1.Spray Drying Technology in Pharmaceutical Industry 2.Spray Drying in Herbal and Food Products 3.Quality Changes During Spray Drying 4.Drying Aids 5.Spray Drying of Selected Food & Herbal Products To Read More: https://bit.ly/3gqaRlj

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Copyright © 2021 Food Research Lab. All rights reserved
Spray Drying for Formulation of
Pharmaceutical, Herbal and Food Products
Dr. Nancy Agnes, Head, Technical Operations, FoodResearchLab, info@foodresearchlab.com
Keywords: Spray Drying, pharmaceutical
technologies, lab scale equipment, functional
foods and nutraceuticals, dietary
supplements, glass transition temperature,
phytochemical substances, Natural
colourants.
Description: Spray drying is widely applied to
produce pharmaceutical powders with the
highest probability to be translated to a
marketed medicinal product. Currently, there
is a growing interest in herbal products with
antioxidant properties used in the
preparation of dry extracts spray drying
ingredient for food and pharmaceutical uses.
I. INTRODUCTION
Spray drying is the mechanism of processing
fluid into dry matter by spraying the fluid into a
hot dry medium particularly as hot gas. The line
of action comes into play as an atomizer breaks
down the fluid into droplets of the right size and
disperses them into the drying medium. The
dispersed droplets mix with the hot dry gas. In
the drying chamber, an air disperser disperses
hot gas. The droplets dry up in a matter of
seconds. The powder is collected and separated.
The powder is separated in the drying chambers
by cone bottoms. A side exit allows the air to
escape. High-efficiency cyclones and cloth
filters are used to achieve finer separation.
II. SPRAY DRYING TECHNOLOGY IN
PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
Spray drying is one of the most impressive
pharmaceutical technologies now in use. It is a
continuous process that turns a liquid feed into
a powder in a single step, and it is an excellent
choice when exact characteristics such as
particle size, morphology, and stability are
required. Bullock and colleagues pioneered the
use of spray drying in pharmaceuticals in the
1940s, using it to dry infusions, extracts,
inorganic medicinal salts, adrenaline, and
vitamin C. Many more uses followed, with
pharmaceutical excipients and the separation of
active compounds that were either thermally
sensitive or difficult to crystallise being
particularly important. The capacity to obtain
powders at the milligramme or gramme scale
using lab scale equipment that resembles
commercial scale spray dryers is a recent
advancement in pharmaceutical spray drying.
Traditional lab scale systems used two-fluid
nozzles to produce very fine sprays that could
be dried in milliseconds due to the limited
capacity of the drying chambers. As a result, the
powders produced were less than ideal, and
they differed significantly from powders
produced with larger-scale equipment.
Laboratorial scale units have recently been
developed using ultrasonic atomisation systems
and nearly laminar drying gas profiles, allowing
the formation of droplets and, as a result,
particles of similar size to those produced by
commercial scale units. This capability
eliminates or greatly decreases the danger of
changing powder qualities during the scale-up
and industrialization of the process.
Fig.1. Spray Drying for the Preparation of Dry
Powders (MDPI.com)

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III. SPRAY DRYING IN HERBAL AND
FOOD PRODUCTS
This procedure has dried a variety of biological
and thermally sensitive materials, as well as
liquid materials such as milk, fruit juices and
pulps, herbal extracts, enzymes, essential oils,
fragrances, and numerous medications. Its
ability to handle thermally sensitive materials is
largely owing to the product's brief resident
time inside the dryer. Consumers are
increasingly interested about the health
advantages linked to phytochemicals found in
so-called functional foods and nutraceuticals,
particularly herbal dry extracts. Several words
with comparable connotations have been used
to describe these goods, including "functional
foods," "medical foods," "dietary
supplements," and "health foods," although the
term nutraceutical is the most commonly used.
A nutraceutical is a food or component of a food
that has medical-health benefits, such as illness
prevention and/or therapy.
IV. QUALITY CHANGES DURING SPRAY
DRYING
When a liquid material is dried, it undergoes
significant physical and chemical changes.
Because most foods, herbal extracts, and other
biomaterials have a complex composition, these
changes are difficult to characterise and can
persist during product storage. Drying is a
process that transforms a viscoelastic or liquid
material into a solid state. The dried substance
might be crystalline or amorphous in nature.
Amorphous behaviour has been reported in
spray-dried materials in the past. Roos
postulated a mechanism for the creation of
amorphous structures during dehydration, as
well as correlations between equilibrium and
nonequilibrium states. Glass transition
temperatures and environmental variables have
been connected to this occurrence.
Fig.2. Formation of amorphous structures in
dehydration and the relationships between
equilibrium and non-equilibrium.
V. DRYING AIDS
Other names for drying aids include drying
carriers, drying adjuvants, and wall materials
(in microencapsulation). Because of its impact
on powder characteristics and product stability,
adding drying carriers to the feed solution is
critical in the spray drying process. As drying
carriers, high molecular weight carbohydrates
such as starch and modified starches,
maltodextrins, solid corn syrups, gum arabic,
and cyclodextrins are commonly utilised. One
of the most important tasks of the drying
carriers is to raise the product's glass transition
temperature, minimising stickiness and wall
deposition during spray drying, as well as its
agglomeration propensity during spray drying
and storage, resulting in a more stable product.
VI. SPRAY DRYING OF SELECTED FOOD
& HERBAL PRODUCTS
Fruit Pulp: A considerable amount of fruits
and vegetables are produced in tropical and
subtropical nations, which are particularly
appealing from a commercial standpoint.
However, there have been modifications in
food consumption in recent years. In order to
have a balanced and nutritious diet, consumers
have been looking for healthier and more
natural food product development. Since their
nutritional worth as sources of vitamins and
minerals has been known, people have been
advised to increase their regular diet of fruits
and vegetables.

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Copyright © 2021 Food Research Lab. All rights reserved
Herbal Extracts and Nutraceuticals: Many
phytochemical substances are found in
vegetable materials, many of which have been
shown to have health-promoting and medicinal
characteristics. The food industry preferred the
terms functional foods and nutritious foods, as
they approached the debate from a nutritional
standpoint. Pharmaceutical businesses, on the
other hand, favour medical foods,
nutraceuticals, and functional foods, and
approach the problem from a medicinal
standpoint.
Natural Colorants and Colouring Extracts:
Due to legislative limits and customer
preferences, several vegetal resources have
valuable use as a source of natural dyes and
colouring extracts aimed at replacing chemical
dyes. Natural colourants such as anthocyanins
and carotenoids are widely used in food,
cosmetics, and animal feed. These compounds
are also non-toxic and have good impacts on
human health.
VII. CONCLUSION
Spray drying is a powerful technical method
because it allows for the manufacture of free-
flowing particles with precise particle sizes.
This is a low-cost manufacturing method that
can produce dry particles in the submicron to
micron range. In order to manufacture products
with desirable attributes, the benefits and
downsides of each parameter should be
considered. Such characteristics should not be
analysed separately, but rather as part of a
larger model that adds to the spray-drying
process' performance. This manufacturing
process' scalability and cost-effectiveness in
producing dried particles on a submicron-to-
micron scale favours a growing number of
applications in the food, chemical, polymeric,
pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical
industries.
REFERENCE
1. Ricarte, Ralm G.; Van Zee, Nicholas J.;
Li, Ziang; Johnson, Lindsay M.;
Lodge, Timothy P.; Hillmyer, Marc A.
(2019-09-05). "Recent Advances in
Understanding the Micro- and
Nanoscale Phenomena of Amorphous
Solid Dispersions". Molecular
Pharmaceutics.
2. Geranpour, M., Assadpour, E., &
Jafari, S. M. (2020). Recent advances
in the spray drying encapsulation of
essential fatty acids and functional oils.
Trends in Food Science & Technology.
3. Filková, I., & Mujumdar, A. S. (2020).
Industrial spray drying systems. In
Handbook of industrial drying (pp.
263-307). CRC Press.
4. Sarabandi, K., Gharehbeglou, P., &
Jafari, S. M. (2020). Spray-drying
encapsulation of protein hydrolysates
and bioactive peptides: Opportunities
and challenges. Drying Technology,
38(5-6), 577-595.+