Ok, so a friend hit me with this question and I have no idea how to answer it. So my friend wishes to make powdered goat milk (don't ask me why), but
he wants in a very fine powder. He says he needs it at approx. 80 mesh but he would prefer 100 mesh. The first thing I thought was to dehydrate the
milk under vacuum and then put the flakes through a food processor and then through a motor and pestle. I would have to do this because apparently
when this milk is dehydrated it forms the very hard crispy flakes. It has the hardness of peanut brittle. I figured the grinding would take care of
this...
Then I saw what 100 mesh looks like...*shivers*...
I went back and showed him how fine 100 mesh was and asked him if he really needed it that fine. His answer was yes and I was told he would make it
worth my time if I had his product by the end of the month. $$$
Unfortunately this doesn't help me in any way, and I am at a total loss for how I would do this. Currently I have two ideas of how this can be done.
A) Put in some serious elbow grease and grind the milk powder till the cows come home. *pun intended* Possibly there could be a machine which will do
this for me?
Any help would be appreciated! BobD1001 - 3-5-2014 at 15:39
I believe vacuum dehydration will be a good choice followed by ball milling with stainless steel media. You can build a ball mill quite easily. Here
is a great book which describes how to easily build a very functional ball mill: http://www.rocketsaway.com/pyrotechnics_ball_mill_theory_spo... I paid over $40 for the softcover version, not realizing it was available as a
PDF.WGTR - 3-5-2014 at 16:54
You could try freeze-drying it to see what happens. The quicker it is frozen, the better. Most of the time the original structure of the object is
maintained, leaving it with very low density. Such a structure may be easier to grind to a powder than dense flakes.hyfalcon - 3-5-2014 at 17:01
100 mesh can be achieved with just a blender after the product is dry. I do all my clumped chemicals that way to get them to fit through a 100 mesh
screen.Zyklon-A - 3-5-2014 at 17:14
hyfalcon, yep, that's what I'd suggest.
This should probably be merged with this.Steam - 3-5-2014 at 20:02
100 mesh can be achieved with just a blender after the product is dry. I do all my clumped chemicals that way to get them to fit through a 100 mesh
screen.
Will the normal milkshake blender be able to pulverize something to 100 mesh size? Bert - 3-5-2014 at 23:43
If your friend's "goats" can afford the very be$t, they might want to run their milk through a jet mill...
No the blender worked fine, just had to run it through it for a while. I figured out what he is making. He is apparently making his own lip ointment.aga - 7-5-2014 at 14:14
ISTR that for making really fine, and really pure powders, you can stick them in a sphere of unreactive metal (probably SS in this case) and bash them
up with compressed air.
The Angles of the air streams are important, so as to not just blast the Product out of the sphere (vortices etc).
The idea is to make the bits of the substance bash against themselves, rather than against lead balls, stone wheels etc, so that you get a really
really fine powder with 0 impurities, such as lead, or stone.
Ah. That's a Jet mill.
Sorry, but when i heard it described in a pub in Sheffield, England, it had no name back then.
