Abstract
It is very important but so difficult problem for food manufacturing industries to estimate the central temperature of Individual-packed foods accurately during retort sterilization. Not a few numbers of methods by heat transfer equations have been used traditionally to solve these problems, however, these methods are too difficult to apply in the actual fields. Because of these reasons, more practical and convenient methods are under the necessity to be developed. A new practical estimation method named as Ambient Temperature Slide Method (ATS method) was developed. ATS method can simulate changes of central temperatures of packed foods under various ambient temperatures by using only two parameters led from actually measured data. In this method, central temperatures are estimated directly from ambient temperatures without dividing each packed food into many grid points, and as a result, total quantity of efforts for calculation should be largely reduced and commercial spread-sheet software is available. In this study, adaptability of the ATS method was tested using the hot water spray retort. Values from actual measurement and simulation with five kinds of packed foods which have different characteristics from solid to liquid form showed good consistency. These results suggested that the ATS method could be used as a new convenient estimation method.
