ABSTRACT

Food technology frequently deals with fruit-fluid systems (FFS). Table 12-1 shows some examples where a fruit tissue is put in contact with a fluid (liquid or gas) phase in fruit preservation processes such as drying, fermentation, thermal processing, packaging, and storage. The heat and mass transfer processes in such systems have usually been modeled considering the food solid (fruit) as a continuous phase. Nevertheless, tissue cellular structure also plays an important role in the definition of mechanisms involved in the process (Aguilera and Stanley, 1990).