Articles techniques et présentations

In the modern food industry one of the most important problems to face is to preserve products from deterioration: a widely used solution is the convective foods drying. Drying is based on a simultaneous transfer of both heat and water that takes place when dry and warm air flows around a moist and cold food sample. The aim of the present work is the development a fundamental multiphase approach to account for the simultaneous presence of both liquid water and vapor within the sample undergoing drying. The transport equations referred to the food were coupled, by a proper set of boundary conditions, to momentum, heat and mass transfer equations referred to the drying air, thus obtaining a general model that did not rely on the specification of any heat and mass transfer coefficient at the food/air interfaces. The system of non-linear unsteady-state partial differential equations modeling the process has been solved by means of Finite Elements Method implemented by COMSOL Multiphysics 3.4.