Electric-field process intensification in food and materials: Pulsed electric field, radio-frequency heating and cold plasma, with pilot- and community-scale demonstrations

Information from the abstract

Pulsed electric field (PEF) processing, radio-frequency (RF) heating and cold plasma (CP) deliver energy through an applied electric field rather than by heat transfer from a hot medium, making them candidates for electrifying thermal processes. This review sets out their shared physical basis and its limits. Because each applicator is small compared with the excitation wavelength, the field in the treated medium is described electroquasistatically; the effect produced is then selected by the excitation time relative to a material relaxation time and by the field relative to a material threshold, giving membrane electroporation in PEF, dielectric and ionic heating in RF, and gas breakdown followed by reactive-species chemistry in CP. Applications in extraction, salting, fermentation and microbial inactivation are synthesised, with less mature ones in cementitious and polymer materials. Three demonstrations from the authors’ programme are reported with their evidence status. In bench tests on orange juice, Escherichia coli , Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella Typhimurium survived the mildest treatments but were not detected after the most intense, whereas Bacillus cereus spores were not inactivated; the counts could not have shown the hundred-thousand-fold reduction expected of juice processes. Energy is compared on defined system boundaries: the treatments that left no detectable survivors delivered 22–28 kJ L −1 to the juice against 171 kJ L −1 for thermal pasteurisation of the same product, an advantage that depends on the boundary chosen and is lost when the electricity drawn by the pulse generator is expressed as carbon dioxide. Priorities for standardised reporting and scale-up are identified.

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Related topics: Microbial Inactivation Methods · Plasma Applications and Diagnostics · Pulsed Power Technology Applications