Electrohydrodynamic Spray Drying Using Co-axial Nozzles for Protein Encapsulation

Spray drying is an effective and stable process, which has been widely used to produce pharmaceutical powders. In the traditional spray drying process. it was not quite easy to control the aggregation and the size of particles. Particularly, the preparation of polymeric particles was relatively hard compared to the preparation of food and pharmaceutical ingredients, typically organic materials of small molecular weights. In this study, modification of a conventional spray dryer was tried to use electrical charge and co-axial nozzles to prepare polymeric particles. Poly(ethylene glycol) and poly (D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) were Used as the inner polymeric materials, and lactose as the Outer shell materials. The results showed that electrohydrodynamic spray-dried particles had a relatively uniform size and particle morphology, and the aggregation of particles Could be Suppressed compared to the conventional spray-dried particles. The electrohydrodynamic spray-dried powders consisted of spherical particles of 2 similar to 5 mu m diameters.