ABSTRACT
Food process engineering has three inherent objectives: to understand the phenomena that occur during processing, to design unit operations, and to control them. This chapter deals with modeling tasks, presents, describes, and illustrates methods for dynamic modeling of food processes, and introduces the use of these models for prediction of process evolution in simulation packages, eventually performed on line. It surveys the main ways available for modeling of food processes. The chapter illustrates which approaches are suitable for several classes of simulation and control problems. A systems approach permits the control engineer to identify the key variables in a process, from a control point of view, without detailed understanding of the process. Numerous works in the field of food process engineering are concerned with modeling, and the methods are well described in many books dealing with first principles of food engineering laws.
