Take a Closer Look at Food Engineering (Video)

Become an engineer in food and drink manufacturing and you could be working with some of the biggest food and drink manufacturing companies

Introduction to Food Engineering

The scope of the articles in this blog ranges from basic engineering principles, based on fundamental physics, to several applications in food processing. Within the concepts of mass and energy balance, thermodynamics, fluid flow and heat transfer are introduced.

The next articles include applications of thermodynamics and heat transfer to preservation processes, refrigeration, freezing processes and evaporation processes used in concentration of liquid foods. Following the articles devoted to the concepts of psychrometrics and mass transfer, several articles are used to present applications of these concepts to membrane separation processes, dehydration processes, extrusion processes and packaging. Finally, those articles is devoted to supplemental processes, including filtration, centrifugation and mixing.

Food Engineering Concepts as a Part of Food Science

The typical curriculum for an undergraduate food science major in the world requires an understanding of food engineering concepts. The stated content of this portion of the curriculum is “Engineering principles including mass and energy balances, thermodynamics, fluid flow, and heat and mass transfer”.

The expectations include an application of these principles to several areas of food processing. Presenting these concepts to students with limited background in mathematics and engineering science presents a significant challenge. Our goal, in this blog, is to provide students, planning to become food science professionals, with sufficient background in engineering concepts to be comfortable when communicating with engineering professionals.

The Difficulty of Food Engineering

“Nine out of ten Food Science students would probably claim the Food Engineering course as the most difficult one in their undergraduate curriculum. Although part of the difficulty may be related to how food engineering is taught, much of the difficulty with food engineering stems from the nature of the material. It’s not necessarily that food engineering concepts are more difficult than other food science concepts, but food engineering is based on derivations of equations, and the quantitative manipulation of those equations to solve problems.”

Richard W. Hartel
Professor of Food Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison