Modelling Modified Atmosphere Packaging for Fruits and Vegetables Using Membrane Systems

Abstract

As living materials, post-harvested fruits and vegetables continue their metabolic activity, exhibiting progressive biochemical changes. Optimisation of environmental conditions during storage of these fresh commodities is required in order to increase their shelf life. In this work we use P systems to abstract molecular interactions that occur between plant organ, film and surrounding atmosphere factors involved in fresh fruit and vegetable package designs. The proposed model constitutes a general framework to simulate the dynamical behaviour of these systems, specially due to gas exchanges and temperature fluctuations. Moreover, the model can be extended introducing other variables and processes that affect quality of such produces. This can be considered, to the best of our knowledge, the first contribution of Membrane Computing in Food Engineering.

Recent Advances in Reducing Food Losses in the Supply Chain of Fresh Agricultural Produce

“…On the other hand, MGS models are often used in a modified atmosphere (e.g., modified atmosphere storage or modified atmosphere packaging) to study the lifespan of fresh produce by reducing the respiration rate through the adequate regulation of atmospheric conditions (e.g., CO 2 , O 2 ). Additionally, to abstract the packaging of different fruits and vegetables [107]. This type of model works on four ideal flow patterns for a mixed gas module including co-current flow, cross flow, counter-current flow, and perfect mixing [108][109][110].…”

“…Over 25 modeling studies on the packaging of fruits and vegetables during the postharvest cold chain were conducted within the last decade (Table 2). The products studied were apple, tomato, carrots, strawberries, capsicum, citrus, avocado, grape, feijoa fruits, and pears [100,101,105,107,112,116,[118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137]. The bulk of the studies used HMT models to describe the cooling process in a packaged material during storage [100,101,104,105,112,119,120,130,131,[137][138][139][140] .…”