Temperature control for high pressure processes up to 1400 MPa

Pressure-assisted sterilisation is an emerging technology. Hydrostatic high pressure can reduce the thermal load of the product and this allows quality retention in food products. To guarantee the safety of the sterilisation process it is necessary to investigate inactivation kinetics especially of bacterial spores. A significant roll during the inactivation of microorganisms under high pressure has the thermodynamic effect of the adiabatic heating. To analyse the individual effect of pressure and temperature on microorganism inactivation an exact temperature control of the sample to reach ideal adiabatic conditions and isothermal dwell times is necessary. Hence a heating/cooling block for a high pressure unit (Stansted Mini-Food-lab; high pressure capillary with 300 mu L sample volume) was constructed. Without temperature control the sample would be cooled down during pressure built up, because of the non-adiabatic heating of the steel made vessel. The heating/cooling block allows an ideal adiabatic heat up and cooling of the pressure vessel during compression and decompression. The high pressure unit has a pressure build-up rate up to 250 MPa s(-1) and a maximum pressure of 1400 MPa. Sebacate acid was chosen as pressure transmitting medium because it had no phase shift over the investigate pressure and temperature range. To eliminate the temperature difference between sample and vessel during compression and decompression phase, the mathematical model of the adiabatic heating/cooling of water and sebacate acid was implemented into a computational routine, written in TestPoint. The calculated temperature is the setpoint of the PID controller for the heating/cooling block. This software allows an online measurement of the pressure and temperature in the vessel and the temperature at the outer wall of the vessel. The accurate temperature control, including the model of the adiabatic heating opens up the possibility to realise an ideal adiabatic heating and cooling as well as isotherm dwell time of the sample under high pressure. This research offers a useful tool to investigate the additive effect of high pressure and thermal treatment on the inactivation of microorganisms.