Civilization has begun around 3,500 BCE in Mesopotamia and the realization by people that they could manipulate food to preserve it, through sun drying, fermentation, freezing in the snow, or cooking by fire, was an important factor for the nomadic humans to start settling. Food by nature is subject to spoilage and the application of any kind of preservation method enables storage and weighted consumption. Throughout human history, many techniques have been developed and improved such as heat treatment, drying, freezing, extraction, mixing and the use of preservatives, among others. In the food industry of the modern world, each technique is implemented through sequential steps, known as unit operations. This opinion paper presents an overview of the main heating unit operations used in the food industry, highlighting their benefits to converting raw materials into palatable products with high quality and safe for consumption. Examples are presented to illustrate how several food products available in the market were submitted only to physical transformations based on scientific knowledge. However, there is a range of intensity in physical processing and the applied energy level depends on the nature of the food, target microorganism, storage conditions, type of packaging, and desired shelf-life. The importance of food safety is stressed since processed foods have been criticized for confusion between nutritious values and processing steps. There are still many challenges to the food industry to design the process in optimal conditions for food quality and with less environmental impacts and novel thermal and non-thermal technologies have been studied and implemented.
Since the 1980's, the technological partnership between Petrobras and the University of São Paulo (USP) in the field of industrial automation has been prolific in double lane. Relevant scientific and technological contributions have continuously been produced within several related chemical engineering (ChE) disciplines. Among the latest results from this fertile collaboration is the exciting discipline Optimization Applied to Operations Management in the Chemical Industry which now is part of the USP undergraduate course curriculum in ChE as an elective course in the last academic period. Derived from an educational program formulated inside the Petrobras' industrial environment devoted to teaching Operations Research (OR) foundations to process engineers and from a graduate course on process optimization, this new course was idealized and didactically supported by the Petrobras Centre of Excellence (Cetai) and has been an undeniable success among the ChE students at USP. The relevance of this result -OR learning at undergraduate level -is here discussed in the light of the crucial role that computer-aided decision-making technologies currently have to the integrated performance of the chemical industry. Most importantly, such OR learning should be understood as a former, yet essential step for ChE students to develop high-profile interdisciplinary research in the modern ChE science. Keywords RESUMODesde a década de 1980, a parceria tecnológica entre a Petrobras e a Universidade de São Paulo (USP) na área da automação industrial tem se revelado prolífica em via dupla. Contribuições científicas e tecnológicas relevantes têm sido continuamente produzidas no âmbito do domínio científico da Engenharia Química. Entre os mais recentes resultados desta fecunda parceria está a criação da disciplina Otimização Aplicada à Gestão de Operações da Indústria Química, a qual agora compõe o currículo do curso de graduação em Engenharia Química da Escola Politécnica da USP na modalidade de disciplina optativa oferecida no último período acadêmico. Baseada em um programa de capacitação tecnológica voltado ao ensino de fundamentos de Pesquisa Operacional (PO) a engenheiros de processamento da Petrobras dentro do ambiente industrial e em um curso de pós-graduação em PO, esta nova disciplina foi idealizada e estruturada com apoio do Centro de Excelência em Tecnologias de Aplicação em Automação Industrial (Cetai -Petrobras) e tem se revelado um sucesso inegável entre os estudantes de Engenharia Química da USP. A importância deste resultado -aprendizagem de PO em nível de graduação -é aqui discutida à luz do papel crucial que tecnologias de apoio à tomada de decisões assistida por computador possui atualmente para a operação integrada da indústria química. Mais importante ainda é o fato de que a capacitação em PO pode ser entendida como uma etapa prévia, porém valiosa, para alavancar o desenvolvimento de pesquisa interdisciplinar de fronteira no âmbito da Engenharia Química moderna. Palavras-Chave:Complexidade; Emergentismo;...
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