The food and beverage industry is the biggest and perhaps the oldest processing industry in the world. Over tens of thousands of years the techniques for cultivating, harvesting, and processing foodstuffs have advanced considerably. The scientific and technological challenges faced by the food processing industry are still some of the most demanding:

• Newtonian and non-Newtonian flows
• Moving boundaries
• Combined heat, mass and momentum transfer phenomena
• Quasi-fluid/solid substances
• Health and safety issues
• Product taste and aesthetic appearance

Cereal extrusion simulation using the POLYFLOW CFD code

Fluent’s range of CFD codes covers many of the applications described above and has been applied to food processing unit operations such as mixing and blending, preservation, filling, heating and cooking, frying, baking, crystallization, coating, extrusion, air or freeze drying, curing, packaging, and storage.

Using CFD, food processing companies are moving to an ethos of “right by design” before expensive “build and test” plant trials. CFD simulations provide physical understanding of food processing problems in detail, and they do so through non-intrusive flow and thermal field predictions. Therefore, CFD is a powerful design and analysis tool for the food and beverage industry to optimize processes and equipment. This leads to reduced energy requirements, increased product throughput, and ultimately, bottom-line and top-line financial improvements.

Ice cream cooling tunnel simulation using FLUENT showing contours of gas temperature

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