ABSTRACT
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a modeling technology that has been applied widely in the food engineering domain and a comprehensive review attests to the variety of food engineering phenomena that are amenable to analysis using CFD. Many of the problems that have been studied are very complex and can easily stretch the capabilities of even the latest CFD technology and computational resources. Although readily accessible via commercial packages or purpose written software, CFD is a complex technology. The field of food engineering is very wide and there are many examples of physical processes that have been modeled by CFD and thermal modeling systems. CFD is often the method of choice for investigations of new processes or ways to improve existing processes. CFD technology has developed to the level where packages provide comprehensive, easy to use interfaces that enable virtually anyone to use CFD. Estimations of averaged or integrated quantities are often the important outputs of a CFD model.
