Modelling transport phenomena in a multi-physics context

Innovative heating research on cooking, pasteurization/sterilization, defrosting, thawing and drying, often focuses on areas which include the assessment of processing time, evaluation of heating uniformity, studying the impact on quality attributes of the final product as well as considering the energy efficiency of these heating processes. During the last twenty years, so-called electro-heating-processes (radio-frequency - RF, microwaves - MW and ohmic - OH) gained a wide interest in industrial food processing and many applications using the above mentioned technologies have been developed with the aim of reducing processing time, improving process efficiency and, in many cases, the heating uniformity. In the area of innovative heating, electro-heating accounts for a considerable portion of both the scientific literature and commercial applications, which can be subdivided into either direct electro-heating (as in the case of OH heating) where electrical current is applied directly to the food or indirect electro-heating (e.g. MW and RF heating) where the electrical energy is firstly converted to electromagnetic radiation which subsequently generates heat within a product. New software packages, which make easier solution of PDEs based mathematical models, and new computers, capable of larger RAM and more efficient CPU performances, allowed an increasing interest about modelling transport phenomena in systems and processes - as the ones encountered in food processing - that can be complex in terms of geometry, composition, boundary conditions but also - as in the case of electro-heating assisted applications - in terms of interaction with other physical phenomena such as displacement of electric or magnetic field. This paper deals with the description of approaches used in modelling transport phenomena in a multi-physics context such as RF, MW and OH assisted heating