Influence of local convective heat flux on solidification, contraction and wall detachment behavior of molded chocolate during air cooling

The cooling process is an important step during chocolate production. It influences final product quality characteristics such as gloss, texture and melting behavior. Furthermore, it a high energy consuming operation its optimization leads to increase in efficiency of the Dark was cooled pilot-scale tunnel with air temperatures Tair = 2, 12 18 °C mean velocities vin 1.5, 3.5, 6.0 m s−1. Convective heat transfer coefficients at top bottom mold were received from model calculations applying CFD model. Crystallization detachment behavior walls newly analyzed by measuring damping ultrasound waves transferring filled molds cooling. In addition, for this-like treated well-tempered dark chocolate, crystallization further detail. convective increases flow direction due existence typical geometry-dependent recirculating zone below also dependent on local velocity. shown that depending intensity homogeneity air-cooling phase, structure density can be increased which has positive impact resulting characteristics. Moreover, wall demonstrated have optimum plate formats 125 g weight apparent flux 550 W/m2, time until reaches minimum.