Novel trends in numerical modelling of plant food tissues and their morphological changes during drying - A review

Food engineers and researchers have been making numerous attempts to mathematically model and simulate the underlying mechanisms of plant food drying in order to optimise the process efficiency and product quality. Numerical modelling has been widely used for this purpose because it reduces time and improves resource efficiency compared to real world experimentation. Different grid based methods have been conventionally used for this purpose despite their significant limitations particularly when encountered with large deformations and multiphase phenomena. As an alternative, meshfree methods have been gaining popularity because of their unique abilities in handling such complicated physics. In this background, this application could be used to assess the capabilities of meshfree methods as it involves large deformations, extreme moisture content variations as well as multiphase phenomena. This article reviews the current developments of meshfree approaches which model and simulate plant cellular systems and their morphological changes during drying. It could be concluded that meshfree methods have unique advantages especially in terms of performance and versatility in this regard and there are potential future work in the areas of accommodating temperature variations, 3-D modelling and multiscale modelling.