The use of exergetic indicators in the food industry – A review

ABSTRACT

Assessment of sustainability will become more relevant for the food industry in the years to come. Analysis based on exergy, including the use of exergetic indicators and Grassmann diagrams, is a useful tool for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the efficiency of industrial food chains. In this paper, we review the methodology of exergy analysis and the exergetic indicators that are most appropriate for use in the food industry. The challenges of applying exergy analysis in industrial food chains and the specific features of food processes are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• food industry
• exergy analysis

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Dutch Food Retail Organization (CBL) and the Federation of the Dutch Food and Grocery Industry (FNLI) for funding this research under the project “Valorization of raw materials and process efficiency,” which is under TI Food and Nutrition, a public–private partnership on precompetitive research in food and nutrition. The public partners are responsible for the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, and preparation of the manuscript. The private partners have contributed to the project through regular discussion.

Notes

¹ Calculated by using data of the report of Gustavsson et al. (2011), where the production volumes and the percentage of expected losses occurring at the processing and packaging sector for each commodity group per region were considered for the estimation of processing and packaging food losses (in million tonnes).

² Use of the entropy generation number, , which is calculated based on the ratio of the thermal energy of the product over the solar energy absorbed, and it indicates the entropy produced during the conversion of solar energy to thermal energy.