Sensitivity Analysis of the Reaction Engineering Approach to Modeling Spray Drying of Whey Proteins Concentrate

Whey proteins concentrate (WPC) powder is an important protein source for humans and is commonly produced from whey using a spray-drying technique. Predicting several drying parameters as well as the parameters that govern the quality of the product is essential before manufacturing WPC in industries. Drying kinetics is an essential tool for predicting the drying rate and various parameters that are rate dependent. However, there have been only a few studies published previously on both modeling WPC drying and dryer-wide simulations using different computational tools. In this article we review the application of a reaction engineering approach (REA) to model the droplet drying process. Results based on dryer-wide simulations using the REA are presented. More importantly, a sensitivity analysis of the REA using drying of WPC and skim milk droplets is reported. This analysis will be helpful to select an appropriate drying kinetics model and forms a benchmark for the future WPC drying modeling work.