Principles of Food Engineering

The course is divided into two parts, with the following aims: to provide students with the knowledge necessary for the interpretation and measurement of the phenomena which drive the fundamental physical operations for the treatment of agro-food products; to apply this knowledge for the comprehension of the principal unit operations of food engineering, in terms of phenomenology, material and energy balances, kinetics, functional schemes of the main plants and optimization criteria. The course also aims to provide knowledge and application methods of mathematical relationships and models used to solve numerical design and control problems of the operations being studied.

At the end of the course, students will be able to evaluate and interpret physical phenomena underlying food technologies and apply related laws. Students will be able to tackle and solve numerical exercises in order to design and monitor heat transport operations, thermodynamics applied to gas-vapor mixtures, fluid transport, concentration by evaporation, pasteurization and thermal sterilization, drying, centrifugation, filtration and membrane separation, solid-liquid extraction. At the end of the course, students will know how to assess the suitability of plants and operating conditions of the treatments, define the optimization conditions, and use proper technical language and terminology.