Food process engineering at University of Birmingham

摘要

The aim of work underway in Birmingham is to apply the principles of process engineering, proven in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, to the problems of the food industry. The processing problem in food manufacture is commonly that of controlling the microstructure of the material -aggregate, crystal or droplet size, microbial load - a function of the processing which the material has received, controlled by the temperature, time, and shear history which the process gives to the product. To develop new equipment and processes it is necessary to understand how structure is developed by processing. The School of Chemical Engineering, which was rated 5 in the last RAE exercise, contains the Centre for Biochemical Engineering, which has received significant funding from the pharmaceutical industry and the Biotechnology & Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) and which contains world-class facilities. Other food-based skills include extensive experience of the mathematical modelling of food systems, and of measuring flow, rheology and thermal behaviour. We collaborate with other parts of the University, such as the IRC in Materials Science and the positron topography facility in the School of Physics.