Simulation of sterilization of canned liquid food using sucrose degradation as an indicator

Numerical simulation of natural convection as well as changes of invert sugar concentration during sterilization of canned liquid food using CFX are presented in this study. The invert sugar, which resulted from sucrose inversion, was used as an indicator of thermal deactivation of microorganisms. The effect of surrounding temperature and F0 calculation methods were also investigated. The simulation was validated with experiment by using a 300 × 407 can fully filled with 20% (w/w) sucrose syrup and subjected to steam at 100 °C. The temperature history, at 3.6 and 5.4 cm from the bottom of the can along the longitudinal axis, showed a good fit against the experimental data with relative deviations of 0.957% and 0.717%, respectively. The relative deviation of the average invert sugar concentration was 0.997%. At a low heating temperature (100 °C), the slowest heating zone did not affect to accumulative F0 (at 2.0 min). The accumulative F0 value obtained from the deactivation of spores increased slower than that obtained from the General Method at 100 and 110 °C but a reversed effect was found at 120 °C.