New measurements of the sticky behavior of skim milk powder

The drying of sugar-rich foodstuffs is often complicated by depositions on the walls of spray dryers, due to the stickiness of the products. This material property has been found to depend on both product temperature and moisture content and undergoes a rapid change from non-sticky behaviour to sticky behaviour with only a small change in these parameters. In this investigation, this so-called sticky point is measured for skim milk powder by measuring the cohesive force between stirred particles in a heated flask. The line separating the sticky and the non-sticky regions is given as a function of bulk temperature and moisture content. For the temperature range from 25 to 95 degreesC investigated here, the line shows good agreement with the predicted glass transition temperature for lactose, shifted up by 23.3 K. This information can then be used in CFD simulations carried out to model the build-up of wall depositions inside spray drying chambers. As a first order approximation to estimate the behaviour of a particle impacting oil a wall, sticky particles can be assumed to adhere to the wall, whereas non-sticky particles can be considered to bounce off it.