Thermal Food Processing

Heat and Mass Transfer in Thermal Food Processing 51
decades, it has only recently been applied to the food processing industry due to
the rapid development in computer and commercial software packages. A review
of CFD in the food industry has been given by Scott and Richardson 60 and Xia and
Sun. 61 Langrish and Fletcher 62 reviewed the applications of CFD in spray drying.
Applications of CFD in the food industry include analyses of airflow in ovens and
chillers, fluid flow of particle foods in processing systems, and convection flow
patterns in containers during thermal processing such as sterilization, and modeling
of the vacuum cooling process. 63–78 The transport equations of CFD can be applied
to both laminar and turbulent flow conditions. The eddy viscosity models such as
the κ-ε approach and second-order closure models are used to describe the flow
turbulence if the effects of turbulence on the effective viscosity need to be considered.
A summary of various CFD models developed recently for analyzing food
thermal processes is presented in Table 2.4.
TABLE 2.4
Summary of CFD in Thermal Food Processing
Processes Authors Affiliation Foods
Drying Straatsma et al. (1999) 88 NIZO Food
Research,
Netherlands
Mathioulakis et al. (1998) 86 National Centre
for Scientific
Research, Greece
Pasteurization and
sterilization
Particle foods
Fruits and
vegetables
Mirade and Daudin (2000) 67 INRA, France Sausage
Ghani et al. (1999a,b, 2001) 63,64,69 University of
Auckland, New
Zealand
Jung and Fryer (1999) 65 University of
Birmingham, U.K.
Canned liquid
foods
Various
Heating Verboven et al. (2000a,b) 89,90 Katholieke
University Leuven,
Belgium
Various
Others Verboven et al. (1997) 113 Katholieke
University Leuven,
Belgium
Various
Kondjoyan and Boisson (1997) 112 INRA, IMFT, France Various
Note: INRA = Ιnstitut National de la Recherche Agronomique; IMFT = Institut de Mécanique des
Fluides de Toulouse.
Source: Adapted from Wang, L.J. and Sun, D.-W., Trends Food Sci. Technol., 14, 408–423, 2003.