Innovative concepts for improved food processing

申请人的研究项目的总体主题是相同的：使用创新的概念来改进食品加工，以达到更好的质量，延长保质期，增强安全性，提高效率和扩大食品的适销性。食品加工的每个领域都出现了创新和新颖的概念，如热加工，微波，射频和欧姆加热，以及过程表征和建模应用。食品和食品系统的流变学和热物理性质的准确数据是过程动力学的有效建模所必需的。工业将不断需要修改或调整其制造实践，以适应消费者不断变化的需求，以便能够在市场上保持竞争力，而学术机构在突出最新进展的加工概念方面发挥着重要作用。提出的研究探索这些概念，以提高质量保持，最大限度地减少成本/能源消耗。未来五年发现基金的主要重点将包括：1)搅拌热加工，重点是自由双轴旋转；2)新的加热技术，包括微波研究，重点是评估微波对酶的增强作用，用于新的应用；欧姆加热，重点是评估不锈钢电极的高频欧姆加热系统；射频加热，重点是蛋白质类食品的连续流加热；3)食品系统流变学将侧重于评估特殊饮食配方，如用于吞咽困难患者和饮料云乳剂的配方；4)人工神经网络建模研究将重点关注渗透干燥、预测微生物学、挤压和收获后技术；5)评价食品体系的热物理性质。

The overall theme of the applicant's program of research has been the same: use innovative concepts to improve food processing to achieve better quality, extend shelf-life, enhance safety, improve efficiency and expand marketability of food products. Innovative and novel concepts are emerging in every area of food processing such as thermal processing, microwave, radio frequency and ohmic heating, and in process characterization and modeling applications. Accurate data on rheological and thermo-physical properties of foods and food systems is required for efficient modeling of the process kinetics. Industries will constantly need to revise or adjust their manufacturing practices to the changing needs of the consumers to be able to stay competitive in the marketplace and academic institutions play a major role in highlighting the recent advances processing concepts. The proposed studies explore the these concepts for improving quality retention, minimize cost / energy consumption. The major foci of the next five year Discovery Grant will encompass: 1) Agitation thermal processing with a focus on free bi-axial rotation; 2) Novel heating techniques involving microwave studies focussed on evaluating the enhanced effects of MW on enzymes for novel applications, ohmic heating focussed on the evaluation of a high frequency ohmic heating system with stainless steel electrodes and RF heating focussed on continuous flow heating of protein based foods; 3) Food system rheology will focuss on evlauting specialty diet formulations such as those used for Dysphagic patients and beverage cloud emusions; 4)ANN modeling study will focus on osmotic drying, predictive microbiology, extrusion and post harvest technology; and 5) Evaluation of thermo-physical properties of food systems.