ABSTRACT
One of the innovative technologies for atomizing viscous liquids and thin pasty materials in a gas is the use of shock waves. This method could be used in spray drying to disperse the liquid feed (see Chapter 14) and thus eliminate the conventional atomizer from the system. This will avoid problems with erosion in disk atomizers and clogging of single-or two-stream spray nozzles. Potential applications of this idea in other types of dryers for dispersed materials include pneumatic, ring, spin-fl ash, and vortex dryers, in which the momentum of the shock waves can enhance the hydrodynamic impact of a conventional gas carrier.
