抄録
The thawing of ice crystal is very important for thawing of frozen foods and cryopreserved biomaterials. It was found that an alternative current (AC) electric field may effect the thawing process of frozen foods and cryopreserved biomaterials. In the present study, the spectrum of dielectric loss of ice crystal (50Hz~1.8GHz) was measured at various temperatures(-60°C to -2°C). The experiments of heating ice crystal using electric field were done to investigate the absorption of AC electric energy, which changes with the frequency of electric field. In order to evaluate the rapidness and the uniformity of thawing quantitatively, a numerical simulation of one-dimensional heat transfer was also conducted based on the measured spectrum of the dielectric loss of ice. The results showed that AC electric field have the uniform heating effect, only when the value of the frequency multiplied by dielectric loss (fε") decreases as the temperature increases. One of the optimum frequencies for a rapid and uniform thawing was found to be at around 3MHz.
