[Formulation and evalution of a mathematical model to predict losses of nutrients during the thermal processing of canned food]

The purpose of this paper was the development of a mathematical model to predict losses of nutrients with first orden degradation kinetics during the thermal processing of conduction-heated foods. The model do not require experimental heat penetration data and operate for any possible case. It was evaluated experimentally for different thermal processes, being all the results within the 90% confidence interval on the mean experimental values. These results were obtained with a Fortran IV computer program elaborated for this purpose. The duration of this program was two minutes and tem seconds in a PDP 11/45 computer and was more efficient than others presented in the literature.