Experimental testing of the thermal response of different food alveoli solutions for packaging boxes

• Autor(a) principal: Leitão, Fábio António Soares Pinto
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Madhan, Sasi, Silva, Pedro Dinho da, Gaspar, Pedro Dinis
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/14120
• topic: Phase change materials; Shelf Life; Alveoli; Thermal chamber; Artificial Fruit simulators

Fruits and vegetables are perishable fresh products that have a short shelf life. Post-harvest treatments intend to slow down the physiological processes in fresh fruits and vegetables such as respiration, senescence, and ripening. In addition, those treatments also reduce the occurrence of pathogen attacks and microbial contamination to increase the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables. Refrigeration plays an important role in food preservation, as low temperatures helps in preventing or delaying microbial, physiological, and chemical changes in food The food alveoli are used to protect and prevent products to suffer from external damages while their transportation in a package. This experiment was developed to analyse the thermal response in two different types of alveoli. The experiments were repeated for the 2 different alveoli and after that bags of phase change materials (PCMs) were added in the packages and the thermal behaviour of the packages with and without the PCM’s were compared. Expanded polystyrene (EPS) balls are used as fruit simulators in the alveoli. Paraffin wax RT11HC was used as PCM. The aim of this experiment is to evaluate the heat transfer in the different food alveoli made from carton and aluminum foil material with respect to time. The test was performed by lowering the temperature inside the cold chamber for 8 hours Once the 8 hours passed the cooling period finishes and the chamber is opened, exposing the packages and artificial fruits to the environmental temperature in the laboratory for a period of 15 hours. Results shown that in the cooling process, aluminum foil alveoli have quick response in the heat transfer to the fruit simulator and it took longer time in the heating process with PCMs. Hence the PCM which stores cold thermal energy is an effective method for cold storage food products in a packaging.