Computer-Based On-Line Assessment of Sterilizing Value and Heat Distribution in Retort for Canning Process

Heating process for food is of importance to the consumers since it is considered to be one of food preservation techniques. Under these techniques food can be stored or edible within a long period of time. One of them which require heat treatment is sterilization process. Thermal sterilization of prepackaged canned foods in retort has been the most widely used during the twentieth century. Typically this method consists of heating food containers in pressurized retorts at specified temperatures for prescribed lengths of times (Teixeira and Tucker, 1997). The process time for canned food is indicated based on the sufficient achievement of bacterial inactivation in each container in order to comply with public health standards or food safety. In addition it will minimize the probability of food spoilage. The traditional methods for thermal process calculations or validation such as Ball and Stumbo methods were developed and widely used ever since. However they required the off-line input of tables and consequently series of calculation steps which might be resulting in too-long or too short heating process. At present there are a lot of commercial software available which could be used either on-line or off-line analysis for sufficient heat treatment or process lethality (Fo) such as CAN-CALC , and CALSoftTM etc. Balaban (1996 cited by Teixeira et al., 1999) described that CAN-CALC software needed to get fh (heating rate factor) and jh (heating lag factor) from heat penetration test prior to be able to predict internal center product temperatures in response to any dynamic boundary temperature for products of any shape and size as shown in figure 1 and 2. Therefore if assumed that the selected can was at the slowest heating point of the retort, simulated system Fo for food products that heated by any combination of conduction or convection heat transfer also could be obtained. However, the software performance was emphasizing with its capability to deal with process deviation such as steam shutting off and back on. The CALSoftTM software (Anonymous, 2011) was designed specifically for conducting heat penetration and temperature distribution testing, evaluating the collected data, calculating a thermal process or vent schedule/come-up time, and evaluating process deviations. It was supposed to use with CALPlexTM data logger and claimed for the most widely used commercial thermal processing software.