Study and analysis of new pulsed electric field treatment chamber configurations for food extraction

Authors: YASSINE BELLEBNA, HAMZA BERMMAKI, ABEDELKADER SEMMAK, ABDELKADER CHAKER, AMAR TILMATINE

Abstract: In all treatment chamber (TC) models used in industry and in research laboratories, the product to be treated is placed in one volume unit delimited between two electrodes energized by a pulsed voltage and the electric field lines are monoaxial and perpendicular to the electrodes. The objective of this paper is to perform an experimental analysis, based on the pulsed electric field-treated beet juice extraction efficiency, of two TC new configurations. The first model is constituted of one, two, or three parallel PEF units comprising several alternate ground-HV electrodes. The treatment chambers made of Plexiglas have a square parallelepipedic shape, in which are placed two (TC$_{1})$, three (TC$_{2})$, or five (TC$_{3})$ vertical and parallel stainless steel electrodes. The second biaxial treatment chamber model is constituted of four identical stainless steel electrodes placed on the side walls of a square shape treatment chamber made of Plexiglas of the same dimensions as the first model. For this latter, each pair of adjacent metal plates forms one electrode. The obtained results expressed in terms of extracted juice mass, betanin concentration by measuring the absorbance, and energy consumption have shown that the models TC$_{3}$ and TC$_{4}$ are much better due to the higher values of the electric field for the same applied voltage.

Keywords: Electrode, treatment chamber, pulsed electric field (PEF), membrane, high voltage, cell, electroporation,

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