Innovative concepts for improved food processing

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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.