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Articles

Emerging techniques for assisting and accelerating food freezing processes: A review of recent research progresses

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ABSTRACT

Freezing plays an important role in food preservation and the emergence of rapid freezing technologies can be highly beneficial to the food industry. This paper reviews some novel food freezing technologies, including high-pressure freezing (HPF), ultrasound-assisted freezing (UAF), electrically disturbed freezing (EF) and magnetically disturbed freezing (MF), microwave-assisted freezing (MWF), and osmo-dehydro-freezing (ODF). HPF and UAF can initiate ice nucleation rapidly, leading to uniform distribution of ice crystals and the control of their size and shape. Specifically, the former is focused on increasing the degree of supercooling, whereas the latter aims to decrease it. Direct current electric freezing (DC-EF) and alternating current electric freezing (AC-EF) exhibit different effects on ice nucleation. DC-EF can promote ice nucleation and AC-EF has the opposite effect. Furthermore, ODF has been successfully used for freezing various vegetables and fruit. MWF cannot control the nucleation temperature, but can decrease supercooling degree, thus decreasing the size of ice crystals. The heat and mass transfer processes during ODF have been investigated experimentally and modeled mathematically. More studies should be carried out to understand the effects of these technologies on food freezing process.

Funding

This research was supported by the Key Projects of Administration of Ocean and Fisheries of Guangdong Province (A201401C04), the Collaborative Innovation Major Special Projects of Guangzhou City (201508020097), the International S&T Cooperation Programme of China (2015DFA71150), the International S&T Cooperation Projects of Guangdong Province (2013B051000010), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2014A030313244). The authors also gratefully acknowledge the Guangdong Province Government (China) for its support through the program “Leading Talent of Guangdong Province” (Da-Wen Sun).

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