Heat Transfer in Food Processing Recent Developments and Applications

Heat transfer is important in food processing. In the unit operations several issues of steady and unsteady heat transfer occur. So for instance heat transfer processes are important for the hygienic, nutritional and sensory quality of the food product. The present edited book starts with a review of ongoing activities in a broad perspective. Then some specific methods of modeling and analysis are presented. also topics like freezing and thawing, microwave heating, aseptic processing and modeling approaches for ohmic heating, frying and baking are presented. All topics treated have significant relevance in the food processing and its likely that the book will be a welcomed contribution. The chapters in this book deal mainly with: heat transfer applications; methods that have considerable physical property variations with temperature; methods not yet widely spread in the food industry; or methods that are less developed in the food engineering literature. The application of numerical methods has received special attention with a separate chapter as well as emphasis in almost every chapter. A chapter on artificial neural networks (ANN) has also been included since ANN is a promising alternative tool to conventional methods for modeling, optimization, etc in cases where a clear relationship between the variables is not known, or the system is too complex to be modeled with conventional mathematical methods.