Transferência de calor durante o processo de pasteurização de polpas de frutas armazenadas em recipientes obtidos por revolução de áreas planas.

Abstract

The increase in demand for food products by the population requires a modern and quality food industry, where it is necessary to evaluate and have deep knowledge, among other things, the thermophysical properties of foods, especially those subjected to a conservation technology by use of heat. In this study, the phenomenon of transient heat diffusion was studied in pasty foodstuffs in containers of arbitrary geometric shape. Thus, it has been the aim of the analysis of the implications of an account (or dependent on the average temperature) to study the transfer of heat during pasteurisation of products whose shape can be obtained by the flat areas provide thermal diffusivity constant revolution. In addition, proposed that the thermal diffusivity is a function of the local temperature inside the product, providing greater precision in the description of the heat transfer. For it was discretized and numerically solved the diffusion equation written in generalized coordinates by the finite volume method with a fully implicit formulation for boundary conditions of the first kind. The computer code was developed in FORTRAN, using the CVF Studio 6.6.0 on Windows XP platform. The numerical tools were validated using data from the literature for the infinite cylinder. To prove the efficiency of the pasteurization method was carried out physicochemical and microbiological before and after heat treatment analysis. The analysis and comparison of the results showed that a reduction in total micro-organisms occurs, without providing much nutritional changes, particularly in the pulp protein value of providing food security to a lower energy expenditure. And, once known the thermal diffusivity of the expression depending on the local temperature, it is possible to set the time required for the food packed in a container with any geometry and symmetry of revolution, comes into thermal equilibrium with a previously set temperature, through simulations. Thus, it becomes unnecessary to perform experiments each time a new container is used for packaging the product.