4.2. Transient membrane stress and peel cracking
Theoretical calculations were performed for a typical case of 60 s infrared heating of a medium size tomato with a spherical radius of 28 mm. Fig. 7A illustrates the predicted temperature profile and the rise of internal vapor pressure at a place 0.6 mm under the skin with infrared irradiation of 5000 W/m2 during infrared heating. The temperature profile was obtained from a computer simulation study of tomatoes subjected to the infrared dry-peeling process, and readers interested in more details are referred to Li and Pan, 2013a and Li and Pan, 2013b. Within the 60 s infrared heating time, temperature increases markedly from 23 °C to higher than 80 °C. Due to the increasing temperature, the internal vapor pressure gradually builds up (Fig. 7A), and eventually causes mechanical failure of cells and skin layer separation or loosening. The effects of temperature and pressure on the resulting changes in skin’s intrinsic strength are presented in Fig. 7B. Theoretically predicted skin membrane stress increases exponentially with temperature. Analyzing all of the measured skin rupture data using Eq.(2) yields an average rupture stress of 1.18 MPa after 60 s infrared heating. The mean experimentally determined skin rupture stress and its corresponding 95% confidence intervals are also graphed in Fig. 7B. At about 80 °C the predicted skin membrane stress value was virtually identical to the mean experimental value of skin rupture stress. Therefore, the results suggest that peel cracking may begin when the skin membrane stress exceeds the rupture stress of tomato skin.
Fig. 7.
Temperature, internal pressure, and stress changes during infrared heating: (A) temperature and pressure profiles during infrared heating; (B) membrane stress changes with temperature.
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The 95% confidence interval ranging from 0.93 to 1.44 MPa estimates the overall uncertainty in the experimentally measured mean value of skin rupture stress. The predicted skin membrane stress intersected with the lower confidence limit value at about 75 °C but did not intersect with the upper limit value (Fig. 7B). This result indicates that occurrences of peel cracking may vary at higher than certain temperature levels (∼80 °C in the studied case) but do not always happen under the selected condition, which is because the skin membrane stress is less than the rupture stress. The measured cracking time supported this argument. First, 90% of the tomatoes in all the infrared peeling tests cracked within 75 s of heating. Second, the distribution of the cracking time, as shown in Fig. 8, reveals that 70% of cracks occurred within 60 s infrared of heating and a majority of the cracking happened after heating for 50–60 s. After 50–60 s heating, the temperature 0.6 mm under the tomato skin was between 76 °C and 82 °C (Fig. 7A), which is consistent with the temperature range we found in our previous Dynamic Mechanical Analysis.