Reflecting on the importance of studying fluids in the food industry

To get an idea of ​​the importance of fluids in the food industry, we must walk first by making an account of its importance in our homes, in our daily lives we use natural resources such as water that are important to satisfy the most basic needs, aspects such as its transport, design in extraction and mechanisms in its storage make the study of fluid mechanics an essential part both in daily life and in large industrial processes. And is that the large food processing industries not only water is the fundamental fluid, many of the byproducts obtained from certain raw materials are obtained in its final disposal in the form of fluids. Taking into account that a fluid is all that substance that can flow it is necessary to say that gaseous fluids also play a preponderant role in the food industry.

It is enough just to imagine that the big machines as combustion engines necessary for the processing of the raw material need high molecular weight oils to be able to fulfill that function of avoiding friction between the parties, and even though this may seem an issue for Mechanical engineers, there is nothing else that the food engineers are not involved with this type of activities since similarly these machineries are for the processing of food. Not only it is important to emphasize the importance of fluids in the food industry for its use, is that there are physical parameters that must be studied and understand in detail that unit operations is intrinsic so that all transport operations can be optimized , storage, processing among others, these physical parameters are:

• Viscosity.
• Temperature.
• Density.
• Volume.

All these parameters and others more depend in their measurement to be studied and analyzed of the type of fluids and the requirements that are had to obtain a certain food product. In short, the obtaining and measuring of the parameters mentioned above provide the food engineer with the possibility of designing and analyzing the entire complex system that will house the transport and storage of this food product in liquid or gaseous form to optimize profits and preserve the teams involved in unit operations.

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Rheology applied to food engineering

In this case we would not be talking about fluids or the importance of fluid mechanics in the food industry if the processed and semiprocessed products were not liquids and gases, but as we know that this is not our case, that is, most are aware that the products obtained in the food industry are mostly liquid and gaseous, therefore we must know which are the principles that govern the transport of these fluids, the measurement systems and the equipment involved in their processing. In conclusion to speak of rheology in the food industry involves the principles that govern the movement of fluids such as tomato sauce on a larger scale, logically the property that will have more influence is the viscosity, how many of these parameters will be measured , for example to know if the viscosity of this tomato sauce will be measured in poise or in another unit of measurement, of course everything will depend on the apparatus with which it is measured.

Fuente de imagen: pixabay

If a food engineer wants to implement a correct rheological design of the fluids or fluids used in a certain process, the following questions should be considered:

What properties are important to measure and analyze to avoid any operational inconvenience?

In transportation and storage we can find problems with high pressure, difficulty in pumping, spills of tanks among other problems, monitoring for high pressures involves, among other things, checking the density of the fluid and observing the pressure gauges. If the viscosity of the fluid is very high it is logical to think that the pumps will have a greater difficulty in pumping the fluid from one place to another. And finally the spill of the tanks commonly can be due to part of a bad supervision to errors of mathematical calculations as far as volumetric capacity, time of flow displacement and measurement of volumetric flow are concerned.

How should the field results be analyzed to obtain a reliable data record?
As mentioned above, almost always an error in the measurement of any property of a certain fluid affects some operational problem, so the measurement data must be archived for a possible correction and analysis in the design of future rheological calculations.

Importance of mathematical models in the flow of fluids

Fuente de imagen: pixabay

Engineering and science have found the perfect link in my opinion to be able to merge the problems that occur in the transport of fluid and associate them with a system of mathematical models. I think that these mathematical models and their implementation is the most complex that fluid mechanics could have, since they are mostly a set of algebraic and / or differential equations, so it is worth mentioning that the engineer who dominates these mathematical models has a large part gained in the transport of fluids.

Conclusions

First of all I want to contribute in this article the need in the first place to identify the state of the matter that has the product that is processed in the industry where the food engineer will give his ingenuity and contribution.

After having clear the state of the matter of the processed product, of being liquid or gaseous, we must be aware of several points: before any negative event in the transport of the fluid it is necessary to check and measure the most fundamental properties such as viscosity, density and temperature . It is also important with all the equipment involved in the transportation of the processed food, which in this case is a liquid or gaseous fluid, if it is gaseous it is also important to take the relevant safety measures.