Research advances in aseptic processing of liquid/particle foods

Liquid/particle food aseptic processing, as an attempt to apply ultra high temperature sterilization to solid food, consists of the scraped surface heat exchangers and the holding tube characteristically, and have not been developed to be applicable to industry. It have potential to process Chinese traditional table foods, would become a focal point in Chinese food science research. As the foundation for establishing mathematical models of the lethality and the retention of quality, the experimental and predicting methods of Liquid/particle heat transfer, including the measuring of relationship of temperature/time of food particles and predicting fluid-to-heat transfer coefficient from dimensionless correlations, is the key to research on aseptic processing of liquid/particle foods. Ball's formula method, as a normal validation method, is not applicable to aseptic processing of liquid/particle food, so a few new models and experimental methods for aseptic process evaluation was developed. The principle and heat transfer for aseptic processing of liquid/particle foods, models and methods for aseptic process evaluation and the objective/limited functions in optimization of processing were reviewed.