Highly monodisperse droplets are attracting great attention both in many research areas, such as aerosol science, combustion, and Nano-manufacturing. This thesis invents a novel aerosol generator: “Periodic Electro Hydro-dynamic Chopper” termed as “PEHD chopper”, and develops a new method to directly print micro-patterns with monodisperse droplets. The principle of the PEHD chopper is to use the fringe electric field of a capacitor to introduce controlled perturbation on a liquid jet. We first derived the governing equations for a circular inviscid liquid jet under transverse electric fields. The electric fields were obtained through numerical simulation. Then we used a high speed camera (up to one million frames per second) to visualize the jet break-up as well as the droplets’ size and shape. The experiments show that the PEHD chopper can effectively “chop” a neutral micro-jet and generate highly monodisperse micro-droplets, which diameter range from 100 µm to 500 µm. To reduce the droplet size, PEHD chopper with a butterfly design is applied on a typical single electrospray. In this configuration, the jet swings at long wavelengths (>R), where R is the Rayleigh wave length, but breaks up into highly monodisperse droplets near 2R and R without satellite droplets. The butterfly configuration combined with electrified jet expands the diameter range into 20 µm to 100 µm. iv Finally, we demonstrate the electrospray printing of Polymer Derived Ceramics (PDC) for sensor applications in harsh environment. A modified single ES with an additional driving electric field is used to directly print PDC precursor without mask, we achieved 1D feature as narrow as 35 µm and a micro pentagram pattern. Moreover, after pyrolysis of PDC at 1100 °C in nitrogen, amorphous alloys of silicon, carbon and nitrogen (SiCN) are obtained. The samples exhibit excellent good integrity and adhesion to the substrate.

In this thesis investigations are carried out on two research topics in context to spray drying. The first research topic is the production of dried particles having uniform characteristics. The second research topic is the development of new applications of the reaction engineering approach which, in recent times, has emerged as an effective tool to formulate drying kinetics models. The reaction engineering approach is also implemented to simulate the drying of monodisperse droplets corresponding to the experimental work in the first research topic. Manufacturing micron- and nano-sized particles having uniform characteristics has recently become a popular research area due to the unique functionalities of these kinds of particles in biomedical, drug delivery, functional foods, nutraceuticals, cosmetics and other valuable applications. Spray drying has been a common and economical route to produce dried particles. A typical characteristic of spray dried products is the existence of a significant variation in particle properties such as size and morphology. One possible idea to restrict this product non-uniformity is to achieve a good control over the droplet’s behaviour and characteristics inside the drying chamber. The current thesis has investigated an innovative spray drying technique, i.e. a single stream drying approach in order to restrict product non-uniformity. In this drying approach, identical sized droplets having vertical trajectories are dried under controlled gas flow conditions. The piezoelectricity-driven monodisperse droplet generator is used as the atomizer to disperse liquid droplets. A prototype single stream dryer was assembled based on the single stream drying approach using various components designed in the laboratory and several parts purchased from the market. Experiments were carried out using aqueous lactose solutions as a model system in order to check the practicability of manufacturing uniform-sized spherical particles. Preliminary results were found to be positive and reported in this thesis. Mathematical models on the drying of monodisperse droplets were developed in order to predict important droplet and gas parameter profiles during single stream drying. These models serve as a platform for design, optimization and scale-up purposes. Several important advantages and drawbacks of single stream drying are also reported. Problems encountered during the experimental work and future recommendations are presented in detail so that a more robust and effective drying research tool can be developed in future. Recently the reaction engineering approach (REA) has emerged as a simple and reliable technique to characterize the drying of various food and dairy materials. In this thesis two new applications of the REA are described for the first time in context to convective drying of aqueous droplets. The REA is used in this study to formulate the drying kinetics model for the drying of aqueous sucrose and maltodextrin (DE6) droplets. The effect of initial moisture content was explicitly demonstrated. The development of a new ‘composite’ REA which aimed to model the drying of aqueous droplets containing multiple solutes has been described. The composite REA was found to be suitable to characterize the drying behaviour of aqueous sucrose-maltodextrin mixtures of different proportions. The second new application of the REA is the development of a procedure to estimate surface properties of aqueous droplets during drying. In literature various droplet characteristics such as surface moisture contents were normally estimated using the diffusion-based drying kinetics model or the receding interface model. Surface moisture content and surface glass transition temperature profiles were evaluated here using a lumped-parameter model (REA) during the drying of aqueous sucrose, maltodextrin (DE6) and their mixtures. The same experimental data used for the development of the composite REA were used to yield predictions. The procedure was found to be useful in estimating surface moisture contents and understanding the stickiness behaviour of sugar droplets during drying. During the formulation of the REA-based drying kinetics model in this thesis, the assumption of uniform temperature within droplets was used. In most studies published in literature the uniform temperature assumption was justified by calculating the heat-transfer Biot numbers at the beginning and end of drying. However, the conventional Biot number concept does not take into account the evaporation effect and therefore would not be suitable to drying scenarios. In this thesis, a new approximation procedure is developed to estimate surface-centre temperature differences within materials following the entire drying process. This new procedure was helpful to check the extent of temperature non-uniformity within skim milk droplets under isothermal laboratory conditions as well as industrial spray drying conditions. Both conventional and drying-based Biot numbers are calculated and compared. Predictions showed that temperature gradients within the droplets were negligible during the drying of suspended droplets under laboratory drying conditions (slow drying), whilst the gradients were small and existed only for a short drying period for small droplets under industrial spray drying conditions (fast drying). Furthermore, it was observed that the maximum temperature gradient within the droplets did not exist at the starting or end points of the drying process, and therefore the estimation of Biot numbers at the starting and end point does not reflect temperature non-uniformity under drying conditions. This is a significant theoretical development in the area.