The scientific research project of the Imaging and Transfers team

The team is working towards process control of nutritional and health qualities of meat products. Efforts are also channelled towards understanding how the brain creates its sensory image of the food, so as to identify the factors determining subsequent consumer acceptability. Work on heat and mass transfers has yielded multi-physics predictive models of changes in various factors such as temperature, water and salt content, and water activity which, once coupled with reaction models, enable computer simulations of the changing qualities of the product. The team’s top-flight skills in structural analysis at multiple scales and over multiple timepoints then make it possible to account for effects related to meat matrices, both during the construction of the food’s qualities and its subsequent ingestion and digestion. Salting and heating/cooking—two major unit operations in meat food processing—are a big focus of study.