Spray drying is the prime process for many years for manufacturing food powders. Dairy powders are one of the main products consumed worldwide. There has been a stream of studies published previously on both modeling the drying characteristics of a single milk droplet and the dryer wide simulations incorporating computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In CFD simulations, large numbers of particles of different sizes need be tracked to represent the size distribution; it is desirable to have an accurate yet simple model for drying of a single droplet, which does not require partial differential equation. Here for the first time, two such models are validated. One model is of the characteristic drying rate curve approach and the other (new) model is of the reaction engineering approach. The model predictions are compared against a very, wide range of experimental results including isothermal and time-varying temperature conditions. (c) 2005 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.