Despite the strong interest in dried aerosolised microparticles in various engineering fields, e.g. pharmaceutical industry, bioengineering, food industry and cosmetics; relating process parameters (temperature, relative humidity and composition of droplet) of the aerosol droplet drying kinetics to the final dry microparticle morphology and surface properties remains a challenge. In this work, a single-particle levitation instrument: the electrodynamic balance1 (EDB) and a complementary falling droplet chain instrument2 is used respectively to study the drying kinetics of colloidal silica aerosol droplets and collection of dry microparticles for offline analysis with scanning electron microscopy (SEM).