Abstract:
Food products based on dried plant materials are of higher demand in the consumer
market, leading to continual improvements towards better products and processing
techniques. Since plant materials are porous structures, which undergo extreme
deformations during drying, material porosity has a higher influence on the level of
shrinkage and the deformation characteristics of the dry plant tissue. Numerical
modelling can be used as a tool in order to investigate the fundamentals of the complex
mechanisms that drive plant material deformations during drying. This work
numerically investigates the influence of porosity to the plant food tissue shrinkage
during drying. The work involves a recently developed meshfree-based modelling
technique, which involves Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Discrete
Element Method (DEM). The technique has a higher potential of modelling large
deformations of multiphase problem domains, compared to the conventional grid-based
modelling techniques. Numerical simulations on porous apple tissues imply that the
tissue shrinkage is negatively influenced by the tissue porosity and localised cell wall
shrinkage is also restricted.
