The role of acidity in crystallization of lactose and templating approach for highly-porous lactose production

• Developing a new production process for high-porosity lactose particles.
• Remarkable effect of templating acid concentrations on BET surface areas of the particles.
• Considerable effect of acidity on the crystallinity of spray-dried powders.
• Significant effect of various food-grade acids concentrations on the yield of spray drying.

This study has investigated the effect of different concentrations for various templating acids on the porosity of the final products from a new templating approach. A new production process has been successfully developed to create highly-porous powder templates through the spray drying of lactose solutions containing ethanol-soluble food-grade acids as templating agents and then removing these acids by ethanol washing of the spray-dried powders. The extents of in-process crystallization for the lactose/templating acids powders have been studied during spray drying. It has been found that increasing the templating-acids concentrations significantly increased the degrees of crystallinity for lactose in spray-dried powders. Textural properties, such as the surface area of the resultant lactose, changed considerably by varying the concentrations of different templating acids, due to changes in the degrees of lactose crystallinity for the final spray-dried products. The yields from spray drying have also been significantly decreased at higher concentrations of templating acids.