Principles of Food Engineering

The course aims at providing students with the knowledge necessary for the interpretation and measurement of the phenomena on which the fundamental physical operations for the treatment of agricultural and food products are based. The course provides knowledge on the main unitary operations of food technology 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 on mathematical relationships and models useful for solving numerical design and control problems.

At the end of the course the students will be able to evaluate and interpret physical phenomena and apply the 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 the students will know how to assess the suitability of plants and of the operating conditions of the treatments, define the conditions for optimization, and use proper technical language and terminology.