Perfect Your Products with Greater Efficiency and Innovation

From food to pharma, cosmetics to chemicals, Fluid Air is delivering big ideas that help you preserve active ingredients, accelerate production, and reduce waste — all with cost efficiency in mind.

Fluid Air is defining the next generation of spray drying technology in the food industry by creating scalable powder manufacturing solutions. Our innovative PolarDry technology utilises electrostatic charge and milder temperatures to achieve conversion, leading to large efficiency gains for your business, whether it be in high-value dairy, flavouring or essences.

What is PolarDry Electrostatic Spray Drying

PolarDry electrostatic spray drying is a low temperature drying technique that combines gas–liquid atomisation and electrostatic charge in a single-step process for conversion of liquid feed to powder.

In both traditional spray drying and in the PolarDry^® process, liquid droplets are atomised and sprayed into a stream of drying gas. Then, heat is transferred from the drying gas to the liquid and the solvent is evaporated resulting in a dry, powdered material.

With PolarDry technology, spray drying has advanced to implement an electrical charge at the drying step, and this allows efficient drying at low temperature and improves encapsulation efficiency for lipids and volatile components.

Businesses across Australia already depend on spray technology from Spraying Systems Australia.

How is Fluid Air revolutionising the process?

Our new innovation promises to enable our customers to better retain the biological activity of heat- and oxygen-sensitive products after drying, compared to more traditional methods that use extreme heat.

Lower drying temperatures during electrostatic spray drying causes less damage to the products that we make. This helps to preserve the bioactivity of heat-sensitive materials, such as microorganisms, proteins, bioactive materials, pharmaceuticals, etc.

Fluid Air’s streamlined, one-step process allows water evaporation at a significantly lower processing temperature (<90°C) and, in tandem, enables an agglomeration process to take place before particles are completely dry.

We do this by driving the water or solvent to the outer layer of the atomised droplets and the solids to the core. This in turn lowers the required evaporation temperature and eliminates active ingredient loss, degradation, or denaturation. Harnessing the electrostatic effect, non-polar active components can be driven to the core and efficiently microencapsulated, reducing surface active losses and resulting in greatly increased encapsulation efficiency.

Unlike traditional high-heat spray drying, electrostatic spray drying takes place in an inert gas environment where oxygen is replaced by nitrogen. This expands applicability to oxygen-sensitive materials and not only appeals to anaerobic microorganisms, but it is extremely well suited to spray drying of oxygen-sensitive lipids and other reactive materials.

Our technology handles a variety of products ranging from microencapsulated oil emulsions, living microorganisms, bioactive proteins such as lactoferrin and immunoglobulins, other biological materials and, to a lesser degree, inorganic materials.

Normally with traditional high-heat spray drying technology there is a reduction in bioactivity after drying of biological materials, but in our electrostatic spray drying technology there is almost no loss after drying.

And when we store our products for longer period, the bioactivity is maintained.

Lastly, electrostatic spray drying also provides an efficient, one-step unit operation that surpasses other technologies within this space.

Fluid Air provides complete solid dosage solutions, so if you are handling or manufacturing powders at any scale, whether it be in fluid bed drying, agglomeration, granulation, dry blending, particle sizing, spray drying or coating, contact us today.

PolarDry PROCESS BENEFITS

• Low operating temperature allows for efficient drying of heat-sensitive materials
• Greater encapsulation efficiency for lipids and volatile components
• “All-in-one” modular equipment design features a small footprint which reduces maintenance and installation costs
• SAFE - Nitrogen Inert
• Contained, robust processing
• Inner liner makes for easy clean-up/changeover
• Process products with low glass transition temperature (Tg)
• Recycled process gas with negligible emissions virtually eliminates regulatory issues
• Complete product line that is scalable from R&D to production-size models
• Substantially shorter process time than freeze drying

Contact us today to arrange a trial of your product at our Melbourne facility

Fluid Air’s testing facility in Melbourne has advanced analytical capabilities to support our Australian and New Zealand customers and give the best possible solutions.

Our centre is also flexible, depending on your needs. If you have any specific testing requirement we can fulfil that. In addition to drying the liquid feed into powder, we also can analyse the liquid feed before drying and the powder properties after drying. We can measure the moisture content, water activity and glass transition temperature of the powder. So give us a call and let’s talk about how we can increase your businesses efficiency.

Email: mark.condro@spray.com.au