Computer-aided process engineering in the snack food industry

摘要

Food science and engineering traditionally have the basis for the development of the process technology related to the manufacture of snack foods. While these disciplines remain important, new challenges for the snack food industry have created an incentrive to explore the potential of recent advances in computer-aided process engineering (CAPE). Such challenges include consistent quality, productivity, safety, and environmental and consumer friendliness. In this paper, we briefly describe basic snack food production processes, and compare them to processes with which most chemical engineers are more familiar. A number of snack food process engineering tasks for which most chemical engineers are more familiar. A number of snack food process engineering tasks for which computers and chemical engineering principles can provide poweful aids are outlined, and the fundamental and practical problems associated with these tasks are identified. Examples of our experience with theoretical and applied developments for specific snack food processes are provided.