Séance Séminaire

Séminaire ACSIOM

On the modelling and simulation of high pressure processes and inactivation of enzymes in food engineering

At present, the demand of safe and minimally processed food, prepared for immediate consumption has increased significantly. One of the technologies that can be used for the preparation of these products is high pressure processing, which has turned out to be very effective in order to prolong the shelf life of some foods. These treatments have the great advantage of not being based on the incorporation of additives and of allowing to avoid treatments with high temperatures, which have adverse effects on some nutritional properties of the food, its flavor, etc. This work deals with the modelling and simulation of the effect of the combination of high pressure with thermal treatments on food, considering the inactivation that may take place on certain enzymes. This model is based on the coupling of the weakly compressible Navier--Stokes equations, the general heat--transfer equation and a first order kinetic equation describing the enzymatic activity evolution. Due to the high computational complexity needed for solving the full models, we also consider and study some simplified versions of them. All these models may be very important in order to be able to design suitable industrial equipments and optimize the processes.