Recent progress in food processing applications of air impingement technology: A review

Air impingement method has been widely used in a variety of industrial applications, such as textile and paper drying, turbine cooling, and glass quenching, because it is an efficient technology with high heat and mass transfer rates. This technology has received increasing interest in the field of food processing over the last two decades, such as drying, baking, blanching, freezing, and thawing. In a food processing equipment using air impingement, jets of high-velocity air (with speeds of 10-50 m/s) are directed at a food product. The performance of the system is influenced by several critical elements, including jet velocity, nozzle array diameter and layout, jet distance, and boundary layer characteristics. The use of computational fluid dynamics, an emerging tool, has been shown to be valuable in the analysis of fluid flow and heat and mass transfer in jet impingement systems. The physical properties of impinging jets, such as turbulent mixing in the free jet zone, stagnation, boundary layer formation, recirculation, and their interactions with food products in terms of heat and mass transfer, have been discussed in this article. The benefits and disadvantages of air jet impingement technology in different food processing applications together with potential trends for improving impingement technology performance were identified and discussed. This review not only contributes to a better understanding of the research status of impingement technology on food processing but also triggers new research opportunities in this field in order to provide more healthy and nutritious food in a more sustainable way to the world's growing population.

Effects of pulsed electric field-assisted thawing on the characteristics and quality of Pekin duck meat

We determined the effect of pulsed electric field (PEF)-assisted thawing on the texture and muscle tissue of Pekin duck meat. The results indicated that 1-4 kV/cm of PEF shortened the thawing time by 20%-50%. Furthermore, 1-3 kV/cm of PEF-assisted thawing reduced the effect of thawing on meat quality, decreased thawing loss by 28% and protein loss by 19%, and maintained meat quality similar to that of fresh meat. Using low-field nuclear magnetic resonance, we confirmed that PEF stabilized the water retention capacity of muscle tissues during thawing. Microstructure and secondary structure analyses revealed that PEF accelerated the melting of ice crystals, reducing the damage caused by ice crystals by 70% and maintaining the stability of the α-helix and β-sheet. These results revealed the potential of PEF-assisted methods for use in thawing meat.