Review of numerical modeling of pasta drying, a closer look into model parameters

In the pasta production process, drying is an energy‐intensive stage which affects many of the final product properties. However, the drying process for pasta is only understood on an empirical basis. The availability of a reliable mathematical model for drying can provide a better understanding of how the different parameters affect the food quality of dried pasta. Models can also allow optimization of the drying process design and/or operation and associated cost reductions. Drying includes simultaneous heat and mass transfer phenomena, and development of a model requires a complex system of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations. Furthermore, models usually include several parameters with unknown values which are not easy to estimate, this is especially true for food materials such as pasta. This work is a review of the different aspects of mathematical modeling of pasta drying, methods and correlations for the prediction of model parameters, as well as recent trends in numerical solution. The application of computational fluid dynamics approaches is discussed. This paper includes a discussion on prediction of the pasta quality indices obtained from the numerical modeling. Copyright © 2011 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.