. Thermal kinetic models
The food industry has long been working on
preservation technologies to kill pathogenic and
spoilage bacteria and to minimise adverse thermal
impact on food quality. The success of those
developments relied heavily on the theory of thermobacteriology
which provides an understanding
of how bacteria respond to heat. Most important
concepts in this theory are the D and z values
determined from thermal death time (TDT)
lethality curves for thermally inactivating pathogens
(Stumbo, 1973). Those concepts are based on
the observation that mortality of micro-organisms
at a given temperature follows a logarithmic constant
rate:
logN=logN0− t
D (1)
where N0 and N are the initial and surviving
number of bacteria after heat treatment, respec-