RADIO FREQUENCY PROCESSING OF PEANUT BUTTER: COMPUTATIONAL MODEL DEVELOPMENT AND PROCESS DESIGN

Within the last decade, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported outbreaks of Salmonella, particularly associated with low -moisture foods including peanut butter. In this study, radio frequency (RF) application was carried out for thermal processing of peanut butter samples. For this purpose, a computational model was developed to determine the temperature change of peanut samples using Comsol Multiphysics v6.0 (Comsol AB, Stockholm, Sweden), and experimental studies for model validation were completed in a 10 kW 27.12 MHz RF system at 3300 and 4000 V electrode potentials Following the model validation, industrial scale thermal processing studies were done with up to 30 samples located within the RF cavity. This study demonstrated the feasibility of the RF application for an efficient processing with rather uniform temperature distribution attained within the samples.