COMSOL Day: Food Engineering
See what is possible with multiphysics modeling
Few products require the same level of attention to detail as food products. In addition to obvious health considerations, the extreme sensitivity of human olfaction and gustation must be taken into account; even a very small change in a product's properties can be detected in its smell and taste. With many factors impacting food products, multiphysics modeling has proven to be a valuable tool for optimization and design in food processing. The COMSOL Multiphysics® modeling platform allows scientists and engineers to account for phenomena such as heat transfer, fluid flow, chemical reactions, solid mechanics, and electromagnetic fields as well as other phenomena involved in food processing.
Join us for COMSOL Day: Food Engineering to learn from keynote talks from industry users and technical presentations about the benefits of using multiphysics modeling and simulation in the food industry. We will also demonstrate how models and simulation apps can be used across large teams of developers and even those not involved in R&D.
Schedule
COMSOL Multiphysics® has gained popularity in the food industry as a platform for modeling and simulation thanks to its unique multiphysics modeling capabilities and user-friendliness. The insights from COMSOL Multiphysics® simulations are now being shared with a larger community of engineers and scientists — driven by user-friendly simulations apps created based on multiphysics models as well as the platform's integrated model data management tools.
In this session, we will showcase how simulation apps and model management tools are fostering collaboration and speeding up innovation in food engineering. We will conclude with real-world examples of how various industry users have successfully used COMSOL Multiphysics® for their modeling and simulation projects.
Lorenzo Spicci, Everywave S.r.l.
In this keynote talk, Everywave, a COMSOL Certified Consultant, will discuss how COMSOL Multiphysics® is being used to optimize the use of power ultrasounds in many food industry applications, including cutting, homogenization, emulsification, mixing, vegetable extraction, flavoring, and bactericidal action. In particular, this presentation will focus on an industrial system for treating food fluids to enhance their organoleptic properties.
Fluid flow and mixing in the food processing industry is often restricted by the delicacy of the fluids being handled. For example, the delicacy of a fluid may limit the shear rate that can be applied. In addition, many of the fluids being processed are non-Newtonian, which introduces unpredictability when determining the power needed for pumping and mixing. The CFD Module, Mixer Module, and Polymer Flow Module, add-on products to COMSOL Multiphysics®, are workhorses for the food processing industry, with ready-made interfaces for laminar and turbulent flow, rotating machinery, and a wide range of non-Newtonian fluid models.
Alongside fluid flow, heat transfer modeling allows for the development and optimization of processes such as refrigeration, heating, cooking, drying, and freezing. COMSOL Multiphysics® and its add-on Heat Transfer Module include a wide range of functionality for modeling heat transfer through conduction, advection, and radiation. In addition, the Heat Transfer Module, in combination with other add-on products, also includes functionality for modeling phase transfer, multiphase flow, electromagnetic heating, and nonisothermal reacting flow.
Combining fluid flow with additional physics enables modeling of composition-dependent fluid properties, conjugate heat transfer, phase change with multiphase flow, and fluid–structure interaction. The capabilities for virtually unlimited multiphysics combinations make the software uniquely powerful for modeling and simulation of CFD, heat transfer, and mixing in the food industry.
Join us in this session to get an overview of the capabilities of the COMSOL® software for CFD, mixing, and heat transfer in food processing applications.
In the food processing industry, microwave heating, inductive heating, and Joule heating are technologies regularly used for heating and cooking. The COMSOL Multiphysics® software and select add-on products include functionality for modeling these electromagnetic heating processes, including unique capabilities for coupling multiple physics phenomena, such as electromagnetics, heat transfer, structural mechanics, phase transformation, fluid flow, and chemical reactions. These capabilities have made the software a valued platform for modeling heating and cooking in the industry.
Join us in this session to learn more about modeling electromagnetic heating and multiphysics phenomena using the COMSOL® software.
High-fidelity multiphysics modeling and simulation provides significant benefits for the R&D of processes and devices in the food industry. Thanks to its ease of use and capabilities for coupling multiple physics phenomena in one model, the COMSOL Multiphysics® software is one of the most widely used software platforms in the field. With the platform's Application Builder tool, modeling experts can build simulation apps for specialized purposes, extending the benefits of multiphysics simulation to a wider community of scientists and engineers.
In this session, we will demonstrate how simulation apps can be used not only in R&D but also by teams outside the development process. We will show you how to use the COMSOL Compiler™ add-on product to make standalone simulation apps available to users within and outside your organization.
Learn the fundamental workflow of COMSOL Multiphysics®. This introductory demonstration will show you all of the key modeling steps, including geometry creation, setting up physics, meshing, solving, and evaluating and visualizing results.
Many food engineering processes are based on transport and chemical reactions in porous media. Modeling and simulation plays a key role in understanding and optimizing these processes and can help to increase their efficiency, as well as improve the quality of the final product.
The COMSOL Multiphysics® software and its add-on products feature a wide range of functionality for modeling fluid flow in porous media, including reacting flow. The software also includes unique capabilities for the simulation of transport and reactions in systems with a bimodal pore structure (microporous and macroporous), also known as multiscale modeling.
In this session, you will learn how:
- Multiphysics simulation supports analysis from the microscopic particle level to the macroscopic level
- Multiscale approaches can be used within a model to describe bimodal pore structures
- And more
Food industry products are often fragile and require special care when being transported and stored. One needs to consider whether or not the products should be refrigerated or frozen, as well as account for the fact that certain products may change over time, e.g., fruit may ripen during transport. This knowledge implies that food products may change with storage conditions such as temperature, the amount of time held in transport or storage (changes are due to chemical reactions), humidity, and pressure.
COMSOL Multiphysics® has been widely used in the industry to model the structural stresses, strains, and deformation that food products, such as fruits and cheese, may be subjected to during transport and storage. The software’s unique multiphysics capabilities enable scientists and engineers to model and simulate the influence of the abovementioned storage conditions on the nonlinear mechanical properties of food products, thereby allowing for the development of improved transport and storage processes.
In this session, we will demonstrate the use of COMSOL Multiphysics® for the modeling and simulation of structural mechanics and multiphysics phenomena. We will also give you an overview of the software’s capabilities for modeling the nonlinear structural materials that are often required in food engineering.
Chemical processes in the food industry often involve complex chemical kinetics with enzymatic reactions. COMSOL Multiphysics® and the Chemical Reaction Engineering Module add-on include ready-made interfaces that enable you to type in chemical equations to define complex chemical mechanisms. The software's unique capabilities for modeling conjugate heat transfer and nonisothermal reacting flow in a fully coupled fashion has made COMSOL Multiphysics® valuable to the modeling of chemical processes.
In this session, we will demonstrate how to define chemical reaction mechanisms using the Chemical Reaction interface and how to include transport phenomena, such as fluid flow, heat transfer, and chemical species transport, in combination with chemical reactions in your models.
Register for COMSOL Day: Food Engineering
To register for the event, please create a new account or log into your existing account. You will need a COMSOL Access account to attend COMSOL Day: Food Engineering.
For registration questions or more information contact info@comsol.it.
COMSOL Day Details
June 13, 2024 | 10:00 a.m. CEST (UTC+02:00)
Invited Speakers
Lorenzo Spicci graduated from the University of Florence in 1998 with a degree in physics. In 1999, he studied and taught at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Among his previous professional experiences, he worked for Esaote, Florence, as an FEM designer optimizing the efficiency and shape of ultrasonic imaging probes. He is currently working for Everywave, a COMSOL Certified Consultant and startup of Unitech, Padova, as a designer of ultrasonic transducers used in many industrial fields, with applications including special washes and innovations in the food and chemical industries.
Giovanni Betti Beneventi is a development engineer at Tetra Pak Packaging Solutions S.p.A., Italy, dealing mainly with the modeling and simulation of induction heating applications. He received his PhD in micro- and nanoelectronics from Grenoble Institute of Technology, France, and was a postdoctoral researcher on semiconductor device simulation (TCAD) at University of Bologna, Italy. Before joining Tetra Pak in 2017, he worked for about 10 years on the physics-based modeling and simulation of emerging nonvolatile memories, advanced field-effect transistors, and low-frequency electromagnetic devices.
Eleonora Manoli received a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's degree in mathematical engineering from the University of Padova. Since 2021, she has been working at Barilla Group HQ in Parma, in the RDQ department, as part of the Global Process and Technology Development Team. Her role is as a process digital transformation specialist. She is responsible for data analysis and simulation for the modeling and optimization of industrial production processes.
Francesco Marra has a PhD in chemical engineering and is an associate professor of chemical and food engineering for the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Salerno, located in Italy. His research focuses on the use of digital tools, based on transport phenomena modeling in a multiphysics context, as design tools for innovative food processes and products. He has authored over 100 scientific works, which have been published in international journals and books and presented at international conferences. A member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Food Engineering and the Journal of Food Process Engineering, he served as editor for a special issue, ”Virtualization of Processes in Food Engineering”, for the former. He is also a member of the executive committee for the Society of Food Engineering (SoFE).