Food Preservation by Pulsed Electric Fields: An Engineering Perspective

Along the years, processing technologies for food preservation have been in constant development in order to meet current consumers' claims. In this way, researchers have been continuously working to understand the effects of different novel emerging technologies tested on foods to ensure microbiological stability as well as high quality attributes. Among these novel technologies, pulsed electric fields (PEF) have shown to be a potential non-thermal treatment capable of preserving liquid foods with fresh-like characteristics. As a result, in the last decade, great technological advances have been accomplished regarding to PEF processing, such as improvement on the chamber designs, optimization of the process as well as achievement of high-quality-processed foods. This paper reviews the latest developments related to PEF technology for food preservation, the current designs of PEF treatment chambers, and modeling concepts applied for process optimization. In addition, some scaling-up considerations are included for future industrial implementation of PEF processing.