REAL TIME OPTIMIZATION OF THE THERMAL PROCESSING OF BIOPRODUCTS

The thermal processing of packaged foods in batch retorts is a standard opera¬tion in the food industry where it is of vital importance to reduce the activity of the harmful micro-organisms to a given level and to stabilize the bioproduct for sub¬sequent storage. However, as part of the thermal processing, organoleptic properties of the food product are also deteriorated. Thus being pertinent to find the operation conditions that may satisfy both safety and quality criteria. This work presents the theoretical development and experimental validation of the real time dynamic optimization of the process with the objective of guaranteeing the maximization of the surface retention of nutrients while satisfying the micro¬biological requirements under typical perturbed process operation.