On the Modelling and Simulation of High Pressure Processes and Inactivation of Enzymes in Food Engineering

Abstract

High Pressure (HP) Processing has turned out to be very effective in prolonging the shelf life of some food. This paper deals with the modelling and simulation of the effect of the combination of high pressure and thermal treatments on food processing, focusing on the inactivation of certain enzymes. The behavior and stability of the proposed models are checked by various numerical examples. Furthermore, various simplified versions of these models are presented and compared with each other in terms of accuracy and computational time. The models developed in this paper provide a useful tool to design suitable industrial equipments and optimize the processes.

Generalized enthalpy model of a high-pressure shift freezing process

“…These spatial considerations are typical for experimental high-pressure equipments, like the pilot unit used for our numerical experiments presented in §3. For the mathematical modelling, two significantly different cases can be studied (see Infante et al 2009): solid-and liquid-type foods. In this paper, we deal only with the case of solid-type foods.…”

“…In this paper, we deal only with the case of solid-type foods. First, we study solid-type foods with a large filling ratio, and therefore a model that takes into account only conduction effects (presented in §2a(i)) can give quite precise results (Otero et al 2007;Infante et al 2009). We will also study solid-type foods with a small filling ratio, in which the model includes the convection effects (presented in §2a(ii)) in the pressurizing medium.…”

“…We consider for the numerical tests the size of the pilot unit (ACB GEC Alsthom, Nantes, France) that was used in Infante et al (2009) and Otero et al (2007). The dimensions of the machine are L = 0.09 m, H = 0.654 m, L 2 = 0.05 m, H 1 = 0.222 m and H 5 = 0.472 m (figure 2).…”

Two- and three-dimensional modeling and optimization applied to the design of a fast hydrodynamic focusing microfluidic mixer for protein folding

“…1,2 The applications of protein folding in research and industry are numerous, including, drug discovery, DNA sequencing and amplification, molecular diagnostics, and food engineering (see, for instance, Refs. [3][4][5]. Protein folding can be initiated, for instance, by using photochemical initiation, 6 changes in temperature and/or pressure 4,7 or changes in chemical potential (such as concentration of a chemical specie).…”

“…[3][4][5]. Protein folding can be initiated, for instance, by using photochemical initiation, 6 changes in temperature and/or pressure 4,7 or changes in chemical potential (such as concentration of a chemical specie). 8,9 All these techniques provide perturbations of a protein conformational equilibrium, 1,10 necessary to begin folding.…”