Introduction

Abstract

The modern supermarket contains a large variety of food items which have been processed by different methods in an effort to obtain products that are most acceptable to the consumer. The industry which provides this great variety of products relies on basic concepts of chemistry, microbiology, and engineering to process and package them. The engineering phase of the food industry deals primarily with the processes involved in changing or altering a raw food material. There are two distinct parts of the discipline which can be called Food Engineering: (a) the descriptive part dealing with the detailed description of the equipment and the processes involved in the processing of food, and (b) the theoretical part, which comprises a mathematical description of the processing equipment and the changes that may occur within the products during handling, processing, and storage. Both parts are important, and in many cases the two supplement or support each other. The subject matter to be presented will be more closely related to the theoretical aspects of food processing. Every effort will be made, however, to illustrate how these mathematical operations are utilized in arriving at useful computations which lead to the sizing of equipment and description of the processes involved.