Abstract:
Dried plant food products are of high commercial importance due to the ever increasing
demand in the consumer market. In order to improve the product quality and process
performance, fundamental understanding on the underlying mechanisms of plant food
tissues is essential. In this regard, numerical modelling has a very high potential to be
involved in the prediction of structural characteristics of food products under different
processing conditions. However, the complexities involved in the heterogeneous plant
tissue structure restrict the applicability of most popular grid-based numerical modelling
techniques such as Finite Element Methods (FEM) or Finite Difference Methods
(FDM), in this context. Particularly, the limitations become more critical when the tissue
structure undergoes large deformations and phase change phenomena during drying, in
the presence of localised moisture content variations. As an alternative to the grid-based
techniques, this work investigates the applicability of a novel meshfree-based numerical
modelling approach to simulate dried plant tissue structural deformations, particularly
when the localised moisture content variations are present. The technique involves
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Discrete Element Method (DEM).
Simulation results are presented on apple tissues, implying that the tissue shrinkage is
critically influenced by the cellular moisture content variation at different regions of the
tissue.
