Mathematical modelling of heat and mass transfer in food processing

Abstract

Mathematical modelling is playing an important role in providing good understanding of heat and mass transfer in food processing. It has also been used to assess both microbial and biochemical changes in foods during processing. Both quality and safety must be assured, which would require good knowledge on how heat and moisture are transferred within the food materials. In this presentation, we shall illustrate examples showing how mathematics could be used to describe heat transfer, flow distribution, microbial inactivation and quality changes in three types of food processing applications in which experimental techniques failed to describe. These three applications are; (1) thermal sterilization of food in pouches, (2) pulsed electric field processing for pasteurisation, and (3) high pressure processing of food. We have used Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software to describe the transport phenomena in these three different processing. The applications mentioned in 2 and 3 are the two well-known non-thermal processing of food, which have shown growing worldwide commercial interest and have been used to process varieties of liquid and solid food products.