Food Engineering Reviews最新文献

Poor thermal stability of packaging materials represents a significant obstacle impeding their applications as alternatives to non-biodegradable plastics in the food packaging sector. The thermal stability of biopolymeric films is essential for upholding their structural integrity and preventing degradation at different temperatures during processing, transportation, and storage, thereby safeguarding the quality and safety of packaged food items. A deeper understanding of the interplay between material composition, processing conditions, and thermal behavior will foster the development of stable edible films capable of withstanding elevated temperatures while maintaining their structural integrity and functional attributes. This review provides an overview of various thermal analysis techniques available for analyzing biodegradable edible films (viz. Differential Scanning Calorimetry, Thermogravimetric Analysis, Dynamic Mechanical Analysis, and Thermomechanical Analysis), as well as explores the interrelation between film properties and thermal stability such as film crystallinity, morphological attributes, chemical arrangement, nano-reinforcements and interaction with other ingredients. Furthermore, the thermal behaviour of biopolymers and the recent advancements aimed at engineering desirable thermal behaviour into edible films are extensively discussed. The present study contributes to the current knowledge base and serves as a valuable resource for researchers in the field of food packaging and material science.

Sustainable food practices within the food industry are pertinent to allow efficient food supply while not negatively impacting the environment. Alternative proteins have gained the attention of the food industry and consumers. To provide safe novel food products, these protein sources need to be assessed for potential allergen risk to ensure food safety and allow effective labelling to protect the consumer. In this review, the various detection assays applied to target potential allergens in novel and alternative foods are described together with their applications, mechanisms and limitations. Additionally, the use of non-thermal technologies to mitigate the reactivity of food allergens in these new products is explored. Non-thermal techniques including cold plasma, pulsed electric field, ultrasound and gamma irradiation are discussed. This review examines the potential mechanisms by which non-thermal technologies may reduce food allergenicity, primarily through alterations in protein epitopes that could affect antibody recognition. However, it is important to note that the understanding of the precise mechanisms and outcomes in allergen mitigation through these methods remains an area requiring further research.

With the increasing demand for aquatic products, the requirement for the safety detection of aquatic products is also increasing. In the past decade, graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide (r-GO) have become hot topics in many fields due to their special physical and chemical properties. With their excellent conductivity, a variety of electrochemical sensors have been developed in the fields of biology, food and chemistry. However, the unique optical properties of GO/r-GO have not yet been widely utilized. With the deepening of research, the fluorescence quenching performance of GO/r-GO has been proven to have excellent potential for building fluorescent sensors, and GO/r-GO fluorescent sensors have thus become an inevitable trend in sensor development. This review summarizes the main preparation methods of GO/r-GO and the principles of GO/r-GO fluorescent sensors comprehensively. Additionally, recent advances in utilizing GO/r-GO fluorescent sensors to detect aquatic food are discussed, including the application for the detection of harmful chemicals, microorganisms, and endogenous substances in aquatic products, such as pesticides, antibiotics and heavy metals. It is hoped that this review will help accelerate the progress in the field of analysis, and promote the establishment of an aquatic food supervision system.

Soluble solids content (SSC) is an essential internal quality attribute of fruits that directly affects consumers’ degree of satisfaction. The traditional determination method, the refractometer, is characterized by inherent drawbacks of destructiveness, labor intensiveness, and low efficiency. Visible/near-infrared (VIS/NIR) spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can be promising alternative approaches as being non-destructive, accurate, and rapid and have attracted extensive attention. This review endeavors to elucidate the advantages and limitations of applying VIS/NIR and HSI techniques in determining fruit SSC, drawing upon a comprehensive analysis of the pertinent literature. The latest progress of instrument configuration is described, and an outline for crucial steps involved in data acquisition and analysis is presented to provide empirical support for future research. Notably, the main internal and external factors that interfere with the model performance in complex application scenarios are comprehensively discussed for the first time. Additionally, the advances in strategies devised to compensate for these interference are summarized. To facilitate the transition of VIS/NIR and HSI techniques for fruit SSC into practical use, future research activities should be focused on addressing the challenges in big data acquisition, sample representativeness, feature fusion, model verification and interpretation, and model improvement.

Food dehydration, the process of reducing moisture in food to improve shelf life, is one of the oldest food preservation methods used by the food processing industry. During dehydration, the porous structure within foods undergoes various alterations, significantly impacting both process efficiency and consumer acceptance. The types of pores, namely, open pores, characterized by connectivity to the external surface of the food, and closed pores, which lack external surface access, distinctly influence the dehydration and rehydration kinetics, stability of the dehydrated product, and textural properties of foods, such as hardness, strength, crispness, and chewiness. This study aims to comprehensively investigate the characteristics of open and closed pores and examine their distinct impacts on food attributes. It seeks to explore the mechanisms underlying pore formation and assess the effects of varied dehydration technologies on pore structure. It finally evaluates the applicable measurement methodologies and identifies the challenges and opportunities of measuring pores within the food industry. Furthermore, this study examined the utility of artificial intelligence in porosity modeling and discussed the potential for encapsulating functional compounds within pores. Overall, this comprehensive review provides valuable insights into the distinct characteristics and implications of open and closed pores on dehydrated food products.

The sugar industry plays a crucial role in numerous economies worldwide, and projections indicate an increase in sugar demand in the coming years. Sugar manufacturing is a complex and highly energy-demanding process, encompassing various sub-processes, including the milling of sugarcane, clarification of raw cane juice, evaporation of syrup, crystallization of syrup, and centrifugation. The crystallization process involves extracting solid sucrose crystals from a supersaturated solution, with supersaturation being a crucial variable. Most previous review articles have focused on specific topics of the crystallization process in the sugar industry. This review aims to provide a broader and updated discussion. It explores various aspects, such as the fundamentals of the process in the sugar industry, a technological description of the three-stage operation, and an analysis of the role of supersaturation. The review examines the main process variables, the most commonly used industrial sensors, and their limitations. Additionally, it discusses the main proposals and approaches found in the literature related to monitoring, modeling, and control of crystallization in the sugar industry. The article identifies and analyzes some limitations present in the literature, including the selection of instruments for industrial monitoring, confusing references to supersaturation sensors, and the need for proper error analysis in the design of process-focused estimators. In particular, there is an emphasis on including information about error bounds for supersaturation estimators.

The fast-growing use of quick-response tags (QRs), advances in colored inks synthesis for time-temperature integrators (TTIs), and spread of cloud computing, create new opportunities for remote in-situ quality assessments. If a color irreversible intensification or fading can be represented by a single colorimetric measure, such as Hue or vector in a color space, and if this transformation temperature-dependent kinetics and its parameters are also known, then a scanned and transmitted tag’s color coordinates at any time can be used to construct a single equivalent constant-temperature history and an infinite number of equivalent varying-temperature histories that would have produced the same colorimetric reading. A way to test such temperature histories equivalency is to have, at least initially, two different colors following two different transformation kinetics, and use one to predict, or at least approximate, the other’s reading. This is demonstrated with simulated colorimetric changes that follow zero-order kinetics, representing fixed order intensification, and Weibull (stretched exponential) intensification and fading, representing nonlinear kinetics. Both were tested by predicting readings not used in their equivalent temperature history construction. The simulations indicate that the traditional notion of a meaningful constant temperature equivalent existence might need reconsideration, especially for nonlinear color transformation kinetics. It is proposed to try low-degree polynomials as equivalent temperature profile model equations first, replaced by elaborate algebraic expressions or stochastic models if needed. Also demonstrated is how successive colorimetric readings from the same lot can be used to construct its almost-true external temperature history as judged by fit criteria.

Fruits and vegetables (F&V) are living tissues that continue to respire after picking, and while this can be controlled by freezing, for the conservation of its components, maintaining its sensory quality. This review aims (i) to review the use of novel combined technologies used in the F&V freezing process, (ii) to evaluate its unconventional variants to obtain high-quality frozen products, including different aspects that influence this thermal process. The basic principles and uses of new technologies (i.e., ultrasound, magnetic fields, high pressure, microwaves, osmotic dehydration, isochoric freezing and cryogenic freezing and unconventional processes) are described. Moreover, was evaluated the impact of each technology on the control of the formation and growth of ice crystals, and its impact on the microstructure and quality characteristics of F&V, as well as their proposed mathematical models. It is concluded that new technologies combined with freezing have a positive and promising effect on process optimization, since their application can minimize the negative effects of traditional freezing methods.

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Foodborne illnesses occur due to contamination by pathogenic microorganisms. Therefore, decontaminating food is vital before marketing and circulation. Radio frequency (RF) heating stands out in several branches of industry, mainly food processing, as an alternative method to conventional pasteurization which takes long process times and overheating. RF heating functions without relying on heat conduction. It generates internal heat by inducing the rotation of polar molecules and the motion of ions. The advantages of dielectric heating with greater wave penetration include rapid, uniform and volumetric heating, presenting high energy efficiency. Furthermore, it is an effective, validated method for eliminating pathogens in agricultural products and is free from chemical residues. Although many reviews have discussed this technology, few reviews have covered the research trends in this field in the recent years, during which the number of studies discussing RF treatment of foods have increased. Therefore, this review focuses on the RF applications in the food industry for pest control, microbial and enzymatic inactivation of solid, liquid, and powdered foods in the last five years. Besides covering the fundamental aspects of RF technology, we also examine its benefits and drawbacks, address the challenges it presents, and explore future prospects

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Microwave sterilization has seen many innovative solutions to solve its primary problem of non-uniform heating. Since its initial studies in the late 1940s, there were solutions that were put forward to address, such as using mechanical holders to contain the inner pressure of the package with food materials, use of fluids instead of mechanical holders, use of strong containers or polymeric packages, and use of monolayer and multilayer packaging. But even all these solutions could not entirely solve the problem of non-uniform heating. After the 2000s, the rise in numerous numerical simulations and modelling software, opened the doors to further explore this field of research with more details and to numerically model the multi-physics phenomenon. However, studies have still not been sufficient to commercially deploy microwave sterilization systems to their full potential. Challenges such as temperature measurement, pressure measurement and control, usage of the right packaging material, and homogeneous heat distribution are still to be addressed, all while developing an energy-efficient process using numerical modelling and simulation tools. Hence, this review aims to study the microwave sterilization systems since the early days of research and the packaging aspect during the microwave sterilization process. The review also explores the potential held by the numerical simulation and modelling tools in this field of microwave sterilization.