Energy consumption of industrial spray dryers

In 2000, the U.K. government's Energy Efficiency Best Practice Programme commissioned a survey to determine the energy Consumption of spray dryers within the chemicals, foods, and ceramics industries. The results of this survey, which included dryers having evaporation rates ranging from 0.1 to 12 t/h, revealed Values of the specific energy consumption E-S varying from around 3 to 20 GJ/t water evaporated. The average for all dryers included in the survey was 4.87 GJ/t. The fuel-to-electricity consumption ratio averaged around 27. The data obtained in the survey were interpreted with the aid of a newly developed model that enabled the performance of a particular dryer to be compared with that of its ideal adiabatic counterpart. Using the model, it was estimated that around 29% of the energy supplied to the dryers included in the survey was being wasted.