A Performance Study of a Multilevel Electrode Treatment Chamber for Food Processing

The use of pulsed electric field (PEF) is considered as one of the most promising nonthermal food treatment methods. One of the design challenges in applying PEF technology is the design of the treatment chamber. In this paper, the effect of using multiple treatment zones on both the pulse shape and killing efficiency of PEF technology is addressed. With the increase in treatment zones, the loading effects and, hence, the circuit impedance changes result in changing both the pulsewidth and pulse shape. The changes have resulted in generating simple exponentially decaying pulses to oscillatory pulses, with significant reduction in pulsewidths. On the other hand, the increase in treatment zones also results in increased number of pulses applied as the liquid flows through different zones. It is therefore important to investigate the effects of treatment chamber impedance characteristics on PEF treatment performance, considering different liquids with a wide range of conductivity.