The increase of chilled and frozen food consumption
leads to the requirement of efficient refrigeration system.
This can be achieved by the awareness of product temperature
and the reduction of energy consumption of cold production
systems. This leads to a need to improve the
design (reducing the vehicle weight and improving wall
insulation etc.) and the cold chain management (good
practice for food safety, extension of product shelf life
etc.). The food safety is major concerns for industrial
and consumers.
Deterministic and stochastic approaches and combined
modelling in the cold chain can help achieve improvements.
It is to be emphasized that the cold chain for food
products has 3 specific aspects: presence of several types
of equipment, a large number of different product items
and several random parameters in each link. To simulate
and analyse an entire cold chain, taking into account these
3 specific aspects without excessive calculation time, it is
necessary to develop simplified models of heat transfer
for in equipment. It is also necessary to carry out a high
number of simulations allowing the prediction of the
time-temperature history of a large number of product
items subjected to random operating conditions. Such
a modelling approach is complementary to survey which
is expensive and more difficult to carry out in practice.
Experimental and modelling studies of the cold chain