3. Conclusion

Spray-drying is a widely-used process in various industrial sectors: food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, detergents, minerals, etc. This relatively costly process is capable, in return, of generating elaborate products of a quality rarely matched by alternative techniques.

The high cost of the process is essentially due to two factors:

• firstly, the quantity of water to be removed. Whereas in alternative drying processes, the quantity of liquid to be evaporated is reduced as much as possible upstream (with mechanical separation techniques: filtration, centrifugation, etc.), in the case of spray drying, this quantity is fixed by the fluidity constraint of the sprayed mixture. The process is therefore highly energy-intensive;

• secondly, the size of the plant, which requires a substantial...