FOOD TECHNOLOGY AND FOOD PRESERVATION : AN OLD NECESSITY WITH A PROMISING FUTURE

摘要

Refrigeration preserves our food, preventing its rapid and uncontrolled evolution. Thus it enables theincrease in food supply for ever growing populations living in cities becoming larger and larger. Accordingto this reality and to the obvious that refrigeration allows a significant reduction of food losses, it iscommonly accepted that the development of refrigeration is indispensable to the sustainable development ofour today's and tomorrow's world.But refrigeration is not only food preservation: it is also widely used in food process and food production.Since the beginning of the development of artificial refrigeration, the used technologies are based onfundamental principles which remain inescapable. On one hand, the predominance of cold production basedon compression – expansion cycles with phase change of a refrigerant. And on the other hand, the use ofgaseous or liquid cooled media to ensure cooling of food products. These technologies sometime use someenvironmentally unfriendly refrigerants. They are energy consuming. And their performances are limited onone hand by the limits of the thermodynamics and on the other hand by the limits of heat and mass transferrate between the cooling media and the food product.After a short overview of this problematic, this paper gives some information on possible alternatives torefrigeration and on technological novelties in refrigeration processes in food industry. It also indicates themajor trends and progresses in the modelling of refrigeration processes.