Mechanistic Modeling in Food Product/Process Design: Coming of Age?

The food sector seriously lags behind other manufacturing sectors in realizing the benefits of computer-aided manufacturing. However, interest in food process modeling (for its understanding and optimization) has increased significantly over the years in both industry and academia. This increase can be attributed to a number of sustained advances: development of modeling frameworks, increased predictability of properties, improvements in software and hardware, and increased availability of personnel trained in computation. The presentation provides a big picture of the worldwide major advances in each of the areas that is making a difference--framework development, multiphysics modeling, multiscale modeling, availability of quality and safety kinetics, properties availability, geometry acquisition, software availability, educational use of modeling, and information sharing. As an example, the presentation goes more in depth on one framework that considers the evolution of a food product during processing in terms of multicomponent and multiphase transport together with evaporation in a solid or semi-solid (homogenized) porous medium that is also deformable/swellable. This framework has been successful in modeling many important processes, including drying that incorporates case hardening, rehydration, baking, frying, puffing, meat cooking, microwave heating, microwave puffing and freeze drying. Shortcomings of the current state of affairs is provided with proposed remedies.