Evaporation & Spray Drying: The Powder Problem
Removing water is the sector's hungriest job: multi-effect evaporation, TVR and MVR, membrane pre-concentration, and the spray dryer at the end.
11 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026
Milk is 87% water, and the dairy sector's most energy-intensive act is taking that water back out. Milk powder, whey powder and concentrated ingredients all require evaporating and then spray-drying away tonnes of water for every tonne of product, and the physics bill is brutal: latent heat does not negotiate. What makes this lesson worth its place is the technology ladder the industry built to cheat that bill, from multi-effect evaporation through vapour recompression to membranes, spanning a fifty-fold range in energy per tonne of water removed. No other choice in the sector moves a site's energy intensity as far as where it stands on this ladder.