Together with our partners in the Drying & Dewatering and Mild Fractionation for Food programs, we are building a more sustainable, energy-efficient, and healthier food system. We take a moment to reflect on the accomplishments of 2024 and look towards the opportunities that lie ahead in 2025.
Milestones of 2024
This year, we proudly concluded three projects:
- Engender: Developed a compact radial multizone dryer that drastically reduces costs and energy consumption in spray drying.
- StAggloP: Delivered fundamental insights into agglomeration processes and introduced a toolbox that minimises waste and improves sustainability in powder production.
- ZeoDry: Completed as part of the ISPT-AFT Fascinating program, this feasibility study demonstrated the potential of the zeolite sorption drum dryer to achieve 40-45% energy savings in spray drying.
Innovations in action
In 2024, we launched the MilDeWat project to explore new drying and dewatering technologies. This initiative complements four ongoing projects aimed at energy efficiency and sustainability in food processing:
- EProTrans: Revolutionising the processing of mixed plant-based streams to create sustainable ingredient production methods with lower energy use.
- Dragons Egg: Building on previous successes like EEMS and StAggloP to reduce waste and optimise resources across the powder production chain.
- THIO: Integrating drying technologies, ICT, and heat pumps to significantly improve energy use in heat-driven processes.
- ELECTRIFIED: Investigating the use of electricity as a clean energy source for biomass dewatering, reducing environmental impact.
Our researchers in the spotlight
Behind these projects is a dedicated team of 13 researchers, including Suzan de Leeuw and Sanaz Aghaei (Dragons Egg), and Alexander Anagnostou and Hilda Nyambura (MilDeWat). The EProTrans project benefits from the contributions of Tadele Maru, Ranqi Zhang, Andrea Cubillos Onate, Francia Gallardo, Nelson Bermudez Aponte, Martin Teran Veastegui, Karolina Szalkowska, and Shivam Pandey.
In 2024, Nienke Eijkelboom and Anneloes van Boven completed their impactful research for the StAggloP project, presenting their findings in their theses which can be found here.
Looking ahead: 2025 and beyond
A successful Roadmap Session in March 2024 and the Future of Food Processing Workshop in July yielded five promising project ideas, two of which are already being developed into proposals. These projects will continue to drive our mission for a sustainable, energy-efficient, and healthier food system, supporting global efforts toward greener solutions.
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