Denmark

In recent years most attention that focused on Denmark and its economic and business landscape has been on its medical, transport and services industries. Somewhat overlooked, however, has been Denmark's rich concentration of industrial companies and that heritage. With many well-known global names involved in process technology and engineering Denmark certainly manages to make its presence felt around the world.

Niels Graugaard expects an increase in activity and growth as Niro's technology moves into new areas of application.

The Niro Group of Companies is a good example. Founded in Copenhagen in 1933 by Johan E. Nyrop, it is the oldest and largest company in the world that specializes in the design and supply of plants for processing liquid, particulate and solid materials. Niro (formerly known as Niro Atomizer) pioneered the growth in industrial applications of spray drying a half-century ago, and then afterwards within fluid bed drying of solids.

Today Niro heads the Powder Technology Division of the GEA Group, which is focussed on different areas of engineering and process technology.

Spray drying is the transformation of a liquid into a powder form by evaporating water contents in the liquid feed through atomization and hot air in a spray drying chamber. The traditional application was to transform whole milk into powder, which was done to make it easier to distribute. Since then this technology has developed, and now there are many more ways of applying it.

"We are the market leader worldwide. We see continuous growth in our business because we are focusing on growth applications. One key area is within food - sophisticated, prepared, functional foods - which often use powder products, components and ingredients. These are very applicable to our technology," asserts Niro CEO Niels Graugaard whom WER spoke with at company headquarters in Copenhagen.

Another important area for Niro is within the pharmaceuticals industry. World demography means that this market is growing very fast. Both of these areas are of course, very stable long-term industries that do well in times of recession as well as in times of prosperity.

Niro has a customer base that matches its global reach. "We have as customers all of the major multinationals within the foods, pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries. They work closely with our process specialists and use our equipment in their manufacturing of consumer products. Soluble coffee is a well-known example. We have equipment that takes green beans to the coffee powder form. In many parts of the world people enjoy instant coffee and as you know in Japan canned coffee is very popular. Many of the extracts going into canned coffee come from our machines."

Japan too, has been an important market for many years. Niro established a joint venture with a Japanese company 25 years ago, and later became the sole owner of the company. Though focused on sales and engineering operations, Niro Japan Co. Ltd. also has a test center near Narita. They are supported by the parent company in Denmark during the execution of major contracts, but also do some small and medium sized projects themselves.

Looking towards the future Graugaard sees continuous evolution of Niro's technology towards particular customer needs. "Through our product and process know-how we have some further development to bring to the market, to the pharmaceutical industry, for example. There will be some key technologies coming from us that will be new to them and provide them with new opportunities in their research and development programs," he says.

The Niro SDMICRO Spray Dryer produces fine powders of active pharmaceutical compounds. Both aqueous and organic solutions, in amounts as small as 50-200 ml, can be spray dried.

"An example of this is the Niro SDMICRO" Spray Dryer that produces fine powders of active pharmaceutical compounds. This was developed as a new kind of spray dryer for the smaller lab market, and limited batches as small as 50 - 200ml of product can be made. This allows more effective R&D and gives more options to pharmaceutical companies," he adds..

Graugaard also stressed the importance of new developments. "In other industries I would like to see many new fields of application. I would like everybody to consider us specialists in powder technology. Drying as such is a bit of an understated technology - so we use the term powder engineering, which means that you can engineer the precise properties of the powder that you want to make for the best performance of your customer's process."

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