Dr Justice Archer

Drying Kinetics of Aerosol Microdroplets: Light scattering properties and particle formation

 The evaporation of aerosol droplets containing suspensions of submicron solid particles is encountered in various engineering fields, e.g. pharmaceutical industry, bioengineering, food industry and cosmetics. Most often, the drying of such aerosol droplet systems results in the formation of particles with diverse morphologies depended on a priori process parameters of the drying conditions and the feed parameters.  Understanding what controls, the final morphology of the final dry particle is, therefore, a key issue for most industrial applications. The droplet evaporation kinetics during the evaporation process, as well as the morphology of the final dry solid particle structure, is highly dependent on the process parameters - drying conditions and the droplet parameters. 

Current research interest includes an experimental study of particle formation from drying aerosol droplets on a per-drop basis to understand the influence of process parameters on dry particle morphology, particularly those encountered in spray-drying processes.