SPRAY DRYER:

The spray dryer provides a large surface area for heat and mass transfer by atomizing the liquid to small droplets. These are sprayed into a stream of hot air, so that each droplet dries to a solid particle. The drying chamber resembles the cyclone ensuring good circulation of air, to facilitate heat and mass transfer, and that dried particles are separated by the centrifugal action.

Spray drying is a method of producing a dry powder from a liquid or slurry by rapidly drying with a hot gas. This is the preferred method of drying of many thermally-sensitive materials such as foods and pharmaceuticals. A consistent particle size distribution is a reason for spray drying some industrial products such as catalysts. Air is the heated drying media; however, if the liquid is a flammable solvent such asethanol or the product is oxygen-sensitive then nitrogen is used.

Distillation:
Distillation a process in which a liquid or vapour mixture of two or more substances is separated into its component fractions of desired purity, by the application and removal of heat.
Distillation is based on the fact that the vapour of a boiling mixture will be richer in the components that have lower boiling points. Therefore, when this vapour is cooled and condensed, the condensate will contain more volatile components. At the same time, the original mixture will contain more of the less volatile material. Distillation columns are designed to achieve this separation efficiently.

Commercially, distillation has a number of applications. It is used to separate crude oil into more fractions for specific uses such as transport, power generation and heating. Water is distilled to remove impurities, such as salt from seawater. Air is distilled to separate its components notably oxygen, nitrogen, and argonfor industrial use.

Evaporation is a process whereby a solution consisting of a volatile solvent and a non-volatile solute is concentrated by vaporizing the solvent. Common types of evaporators used in the industry include i) forced circulation evaporators ii) natural circulation evaporators (thermosiphon) iii) falling film evaporators iv) rising film evaporators Drying differs from evaporation in that the product in this case is solid. In many industrial applications, water is used as the solvent while steam is utilized as heating medium for the vaporization process. In such cases, given efficient heat exchange, one kilogram of water may be evaporated per kilogram of steam condensed.

Safety Precautions:
1. There are several process and steam valves that discharge directly into the room. Do not touch a valve until you know what you are doing! The tagged valves are particularly dangerous. Steam burns can be very serious. If you overfeed the evaporator above the top view port, turn off the main steam immediately. There is a header valve on the steam next to the east wall (near the laboratory door). When opening valves on the second floor, be careful that liquid is not discharged onto persons below. Always wear hard hats when working in the bay area.

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Be sure that the condenser coolant is turned on before the steam and that coolant is not turned off until after boiling has stopped. The pump seals are supposed to drip slowly. This lubricates the packing.

COOLING TOWERS :
Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and cool the working fluid to near the wet-bulb air temperature or, in the case of closed circuit dry cooling towers, rely solely on air to cool the working fluid to near the dry-bulb air temperature. Common applications include cooling the circulating water used in oil refineries, petrochemical and otherchemical plants, thermal power stations and HVAC systems for cooling buildings. The main types of cooling towers are natural draft and induced draft cooling towers. The classification is based on the type of air induction into the tower. Some cool towers use natural draft whereby buoyancy is used via tall chimneys, some use mechanical draft where power-driven fan motors are used, some use induced draft, some use forced draft, and some use fan-assisted natural draft.