Extrusion cooking modeling, control, and optimization

Abstract Besides experimental approaches, the development of new products by extrusion requires the support of theoretical approaches that provide information on process conditions and their effects on product characteristics. Instead of tedious trial and error procedures, process modeling may rapidly help to avoid inappropriate solutions and to focus on essential developments. This trend has emerged during the last decades, but due to the complexity of food component changes and phenomena developed during extrusion, it has been less common in the food extrusion domain. However, scientific approaches of numerical modeling have also been developed in food processing especially by applying computational fluid dynamics. Conversely, the development of sensing and data processing methods (in relation to Chapter 9) has found applications in product design and dynamic process control. In this chapter, we review the available modeling methods and illustrate their possible application for controlling process and optimize product design, according to the latest scientific developments.