A tube-in-tube food pasteurizer modelling for a digital twin application

Abstract

The process control in food industry plays an essential role to guarantee safety and quality of the manufactured food products. In order to increase the control possibility, the "Digital Twin" approach can be implemented in several food equipment, which can have a model that replies the real machine functioning. In this study a tube in tube pasteurizer has been modelled considering thermo-fluid dynamic parameters and conditions in order to simulate a beverage pasteurization process. The proposed model considers the use of possible non-newtonian fluids as it frequently happens in the food industry. After the model validation, a series of temperature and pressure probes located on the real plant and a data acquisition module will give in the future a comparison between real and simulated data in order to control the process status and avoid safety issues. In this way the operators will be able to act before something get wrong, without food product loosing.

Can a Byte Improve Our Bite? An Analysis of Digital Twins in the Food Industry

“…The second most frequently assigned stage is the processing stage (31.37%). In this stage, the digital twins mainly concern processing machines, as pasteurizer [ 30 , 57 ] or packaging machines [ 45 , 72 ], or entire processing systems [ 6 , 45 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 ]. A few use cases focus on the optimal product composition or quality [ 45 , 46 , 77 ].…”

“…Almost the same proportion of applications are used for simulation, based on mechanistic or physics-based models (31.37%). Many use cases regard either the plant and animal growth in the production stage [ 36 , 53 , 61 , 62 , 64 , 69 ] or the monitoring of food processing, e.g., a pasteurizer, an ice cream machine, pudding production, malting, or the packaging design concerning special product properties [ 30 , 45 , 57 , 73 , 74 , 76 ]. More digital twins focus on fruit and vegetable quality during supply by measuring the surface temperature and calculating the pulp temperature based on that [ 14 , 56 ].…”

“…Some applications use the stored information for learning and improving the system [ 34 , 53 , 54 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 68 , 78 , 80 ]. Other applications were implemented to better document the processes and quality parameters of the physical objects [ 6 , 30 , 47 , 57 , 74 , 76 , 79 ]. It should be noted that due to a lack of information, many applications could not be classified in this category [ 23 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 56 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 73 , 75 ].…”

“…Further, the originally published digital twin might be sufficient for some applications. In particular, those publications were from Skobelev et al [ 36 , 53 , 54 ] concerning (wheat) plants; from Defraeye et al [ 8 , 55 ], Shoji et al [ 14 ], and Tagliavini et al [ 56 ] regarding fruits; and from Bottani et al [ 30 ] and Vignali and Bottani [ 57 ] relating to a pasteurizer.…”

Analyzing the Implementation of Digital Twins in the Agri-Food Supply Chain

“…Transportation and storage of fruit To provide insights regarding the thermophysical behavior of fruit [48] Food retail supply chains To enhance end-to-end visibility and resilient management of demand, inventory, and capacity [22] Postharvest supply chains To provide insight with actionable data and aid in detecting and predicting supply chain issues [15] Refrigerated transport and cold storage To optimize the cooling process for a variety of fruits and vegetables with complex shapes and compositions [46] Cold chain For cold chain optimizations in the design process [45] Food industry To enhance food quality and traceability, and design personalized foods [16] Refrigerated supply chain For monitoring food quality and marketability [ To enhance farm management [52] Food processing plant To enhance pasteurization and predict processing conditions in beverage processing [53,54] Recently, agricultural sectors such as controlled environment agriculture, open-field agriculture, and animal farming have started using DTs [48,55,56]. As the next phase of the digitization paradigm, DT technologies can help farmers by enabling continuous and real-time monitoring of the physical world (the farm) and updating the status of the virtual environment [57].…”