BEE 5630
Digital Food Physics and Engineering
Mechanistic, model-based understanding and digital tools critically innovate in the design cycle for products and processes, food manufacturing is no exception. The course will introduce tools such as computational modeling, digital twins, and predictive knowledge bases, exploring deeper into the underlying universal physics-based frameworks describing transformations in food during processing. Students choose their own semester-long computational project, which is a major part of the course (no exams). Course is taught hybrid (one in-class meeting a week with the rest web-based).
Topics
- Explain a food physics framework in terms of its basic building blocks that can describe many food processes.
- Compare and contrast between simpler and more comprehensive physics frameworks for understanding food processes.
- Apply a food physics framework to complex food processes for their understanding and optimization.
- Create framework-based computational model of a food process that speeds up the design cycle.
- Analyze the transport phenomena, solid mechanics, and multiphysics (such as when microwave heating is added).
- Break down a food process into its multiphysics-- transport phenomena, solid mechanics, electromagnetics, together with quality and safety kinetics, to have its comprehensive understanding.
Official roster learning outcomes
Prerequisites & course information
background equivalent to: BEE 3500 or CHEME 3240 or MAE 3240 or permission of instructor.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027
- Catalogue entry ↗
Catalogue variants
- Digital Food Physics and Engineering · 3.0 · Graduate