Modeling Food Particle Systems: A Review of Current Progress and Challenges

For many years, food engineers have attempted to describe physical phenomena such as heat and mass transfer in food via mathematical models. Still, the impact and benefits of computer-aided engineering are less established in food than in most other industries today. Complexity in the structure and composition of food matrices are largely responsible for this gap. During processing of food, its temperature, moisture, and structure can change continuously, along with its physical properties. We summarize the knowledge foundation, recent progress, and remaining limitations in modeling food particle systems in four relevant areas: flowability, size reduction, drying, and granulation and agglomeration. Our goal is to enable researchers in academia and industry dealing with food powders to identify approaches to address their challenges with adequate model systems or through structural and compositional simplifications. With advances in computer simulation capacity, detailed particle-scale models are now available for many applications. Here, we discuss aspects that require further attention, especially related to physics-based contact models for discrete-element models of food particle systems.