Advantages and functions of vacuum dryers

Drying has been used as a method of preserving food since ancient times. Over time, the drying process gradually expanded from open air drying or sun drying to other drying techniques such as solar drying, freeze drying and vacuum drying. Drying is also a key process in many fields of application, from pharmaceuticals to the plastics industry and beyond.

We will focus on the chemical process of vacuum drying, which is especially useful when drying heat-sensitive materials such as food and pharmaceuticals. Often referred to as a vacuum oven in the pharmaceutical industry, a vacuum dryer has other advantages as well. Because vacuum dryers need to operate at lower temperatures, they use less energy, reducing costs.

At the same time, the vacuum dryer can also recover the solvent and avoid oxidation.

The vacuum dryer can remove water and organic solvents from the wet powder. Dryers work by reducing the pressure around a liquid in a vacuum, which lowers the liquid's boiling point and increases the rate of evaporation.

As a result, the liquid dries faster (another major advantage of this process).

In order for vacuum drying to be effective, we need to reduce the number of drying times without harming the product, which means we need to strictly control the operating conditions. To balance these goals and understand how operating conditions affect your product, use the multiphysics modeling capabilities of COMSOL Multiphysics.