About myself

My interest in food process engineering began during my bachelor's degree in bioengineering at KIT. Accordingly, I did my bachelor's thesis at the Institute of Food Process Engineering. During my subsequent master's internship at Milk & Whey Ingredients by Sachsenmilch, I was able to gain initial experience in the field of spray drying. The subject of drying technology accompanied me the following years as well. For my master’s thesis I studied the heat and mass transfer during freeze-drying of a methylcellulose gel. Since May 2021, I have been working on my doctorate as a research assistant in the field of spray drying of emulsions at the LVT.

Research focus

Spray drying is one of the most important processes for producing powders from liquids. It is a convective drying process in which the liquid is atomized into fine droplets, which are subsequently dried into particles by contact with a hot air stream. The atomization of the liquid leads to an enormous increase in surface area, which allow for extremely short drying times. Due to the short residence time of the dry material, a high product quality can be guaranteed.

An interesting field of application is the spray drying of emulsions. This is a widely used encapsulation technique for the production of a large number of powdered formulations, which is used not only in the food industry but also in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. The structure of the dried powder is crucial for the processing and quality properties of the powder product. It is therefore of great advantage to know the effect of the material and process parameters on the final powder product during spray drying. The focus of my work is therefore on the investigation of the influence of the drying step on particle morphology, drying kinetics and encapsulation efficiency of the oil droplets during spray drying.

Methods

Drying tests can be carried out on a pilot scale at the institute's own pilot plant spray tower with up to 20 kg/h water evaporation and air inlet temperatures of up to 250 °C.  A single droplet test setup is currently being set up at the institute for a model observation of the drying process. For atomization experiments, a spray stand is available which allows online measurement of the spray droplet size distribution by laser diffraction spectroscopy and sampling of the atomized emulsion. Common analytical techniques such as laser diffraction, optical microscopy and rheometry are used to characterize the emulsions and the powder produced.