ENHANCED MICROWAVE ASSISTED PROCESSING OF 2D CYLINDRICAL POROUS FOOD DIELECTRIC

The exigencies of a swift, qualitative and economical procedure for the food industry was addressed by the microwave assisted processing such as heating, drying, thawing, etc1. A food material in itself is a complex sample with multiple components and varying dielectric properties which makes its mathematical modeling arduous. The most realistic approach is to consider the food as a porous dielectric which basically consists of a continuous phase and one or more dispersed phases2. The porous dielectrics considered for this study is meat as the continuous phase and oil, water or air as dispersed phase. A theoretical analysis has been performed to study the thermal effects on the 2D cylindrical porous food dielectrics subjected to microwave irradiation. The analysis comprises of different porosity conditions (Φ = 0.1, 0.25 and 0.4), different initial intensities (I0 = 1 and 1.5 Wcm-2) and different dispersed phases. Galerkin finite element analysis has been used to solve electric field and energy balance equations with suitable boundary conditions.