title: Emerging techniques for assisting and accelerating food freezing processes: A review of recent research progresses.
abstract: Freezing plays an important role in food preservation and the emergence of rapid freezing technologies can be highly beneficial to the food industry. This paper reviews some novel food freezing technologies, including high-pressure freezing (HPF), ultrasound-assisted freezing (UAF), electrically disturbed freezing (EF) and magnetically disturbed freezing (MF), microwave-assisted freezing (MWF), and osmo-dehydro-freezing (ODF). HPF and UAF can initiate ice nucleation rapidly, leading to uniform distribution of ice crystals and the control of their size and shape. Specifically, the former is focused on increasing the degree of supercooling, whereas the latter aims to decrease it. Direct current electric freezing (DC-EF) and alternating current electric freezing (AC-EF) exhibit different effects on ice nucleation. DC-EF can promote ice nucleation and AC-EF has the opposite effect. Furthermore, ODF has been successfully used for freezing various vegetables and fruit. MWF cannot control the nucleation temperature, but can decrease supercooling degree, thus decreasing the size of ice crystals. The heat and mass transfer processes during ODF have been investigated experimentally and modeled mathematically. More studies should be carried out to understand the effects of these technologies on food freezing process.
authors.affiliation: a School of Food Science and Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.|b Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering , South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Lina
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: a School of Food Science and Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.|b Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering , South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center , Guangzhou , China.|c Food Refrigeration and Computerized Food Technology , Agriculture and Food Science Centre, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland , Belfield , Dublin , Ireland.
authors.forename: Da-Wen
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: a School of Food Science and Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.|b Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering , South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Zhiwei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: a School of Food Science and Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.|b Academy of Contemporary Food Engineering , South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Zi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D055590:Electromagnetic Phenomena; D005519:Food Preservation / Q000379:methods*; D005615:Freezing; D011312:Pressure; D013814:Thermal Conductivity; D014465:Ultrasonics
keywords: High-pressure freezing; electrically and magnetically disturbed freezing,; osmo-dehydro-freezing; ultrasound-assisted freezing