Multiscale interaction between energy and food quality in the super cold chain for sustainable agriculture

For the cold chain of fresh agricultural food, a good balance between energy and quality must be carefully considered. Most of previous researches focused on macroscale and mesoscale, while neglecting the significance of microscale. In the present study, the super cold chain is extended to multiscale studies on the interaction between energy and food quality by illustrating four representative cases. At microscale and mesoscale, such methods as X-ray computed tomography and stochastic reconstruction are adopted to analyse the multi-phase and multi-component porous structure. At macroscale, the dissipation factor is applied to evaluate the heterogeneity and optimise the system. Besides, representative volume element (RVE) method is a bridge between different scales, and heat and mass transport are solved simultaneously. Therefore, based on the special focus on sustainable agriculture, super cold chain has the potential to achieve less food quality loss and lower energy consumption, thereby decreasing effects on global warming.