1 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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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.+