On Wednesday, September 6, our PhD candidate Edyta Piechnik, had the pleasure of presenting paper "Numerical Analysis of Food Freezing and Airflow Distribution in a Home-Scale Freeze Dryer" at the 14th International Conference on Computational Heat and Mass Transfer (ICCHMT 2023), which took place in Düsseldorf, Germany. The conference was held by Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences
It was a great opportunity to talk about the coupled, three-dimensional CFD model of food freezing in a domestic-scale freeze dryer, which was developed as part of Edyta's PhD thesis and the FrostWave project. Given the complexity of the freeze-drying chamber, the developed model incorporates a variety of multiscale processes, including the operation of the air fan, the operation of the evaporator, and the freezing process occurring within the food sample. Hence, three sub-models were integrated within an in-house developed script to ensure a computationally efficient approach.
At the same event, prof. Jacek Smołka gave a presentation titled "Numerical and Experimental Study on Domestic-Scale Freeze-Dryer for Foods Equipped with Natural Refrigeration and Microwave Heating Systems", where he raised issues related to numerical analysis of the electromagnetic field distribution and the related challenges.
The above models were verified based on experimental data collected from the reference device and ultimately used to develop a new internal design of a prototype freeze dryer chamber equipped with microwave heating and a modified refrigeration system.
