Modeling and simulation of reactive and separation food bed processes

The computational advances gained in numerical methods, software, and hardware allow us to perform rigorous modeling and simulation of complex phenomena taking place in food solid beds. Reactive extraction food processing (e.g., pectin from protopectin), ion-exchange chromatography, reactive distillation, and immobilized enzyme reactors are good examples. A general approach proposed herein is modeling in terms of their multicomponent, multiphase, and heterogeneous nature, coupling fluid phase constitutive equations (transport) via interface transport, to those describing the solid (reaction) phase. In this way, a common mathematical structure for different problems is obtained. The linear differential equations from the fluid phases, linked to the nonlinear terms of the solid phase, can be analyzed and solved using, wherever possible, a similar implemented numerical scheme.