Evaluation of the differences of process variables in vertical and horizontal configurations of High Pressure Thermal (HPT) processing systems through numerical modelling

High Pressure Thermal (HPT) processing of foods is a preservation technology which satisfies consumer demand for high-quality products. Numerical modelling can be used to predict locally specified temperature profiles arising during HPT processing, which is very important in order to ensure microbiological food safety and quality. To date all of the models developed and published on prediction of temperature and flow distribution are based on, to the best of our knowledge, vertically oriented HPT units. However, because of the increase of horizontal units in industry, and the lack of published work on horizontal models, it was seen important to bridge this research gap in order to advance the technology further. In this work a horizontal model was developed by adapting a previously validated vertical one. It was shown that the temperature performance and uniformity is different for the two configurations, indicating that the research conducted on vertical systems is not directly transferable to horizontal systems in HPT processing.

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