During cooking, chicken meat shrinks and expels moisture. Industries that produce precooked chicken meat on a large scale do not like these properties of chicken meat and they have a major interest in preventing shrinkage and moisture loss. For this reason, Stork, manufacturer of industrial tunnel ovens, initiated a research project concerned with the cooking of chicken filet. A great part of the research is carried out by Agrotechnology and food Innovations, being an institute with much knowledge about the food industry.
In my final project we want to develop a simulation tool that describes the cooking of a chicken filet. After having developed such a tool, we can simulate different cooking strategies and see what effect they have on the shrinkage and moisture loss. Ideally, this would result in some advices for the Stork about the optimal cooking process. They might be able to use this information to build the perfect tunnel oven.
The chicken meat is modelled as a poro-elastic medium. We assume that the meat consists of two components only: proteins and moisture. The proteins are structured in a regular lattice and the moisture is positioned between the proteins. When temperature rises, proteins deform. In particular, the proteins get shorter, causing the protein lattice to shrink. Therefore, the meat as a whole shrinks when temperature rises. A side-effect of this shrinkage is the moisture loss. Since there is less space for the moisture in the protein lattice, it is expelled from the meat.
The physical processes above can be described by mass, momentum, and energy balances, and continuity and constitutive equations. This results in a set of nonlinear partial differential equations, together with initial and boundary conditions. With the help of a numerical package, this set of equations can be solved and we can develop a simulation tool based on this solution.