ABSTRACT
The production of dairy powders, although seeing significant and continuous improvement in the last decades, still presents limitations related to the drying process stability and the subsequent storage of the final product. Such inconveniences are possibly due to the intrinsic complexity of the processed fluids. The optimization of the operations to transform raw milk into dairy powders involves the challenging question of the physico-chemical mechanisms governing the droplet-to-particle transition. To this end, recently the research on the drying of dairy solutions broadened its horizons, progressing from the industrial large-scale to the laboratory approach. In this concluding section, we provide a review of the strengths and the weaknesses of the experimental approaches currently used for the investigation of the drying dynamics at the droplet scale, such as pilot drier systems, levitated droplet apparatus and single-droplet setups. Moreover, microscopy and microfluidics methodologies open new avenues for characterizing the evaporation of dairy droplets at the micro-scale and, in particular, the related evolution of their morphological and mechanical properties throughout the drying process.
