Toward a fast and flexible transfer model for horticultural products packaged into boxes.

Packaging fruit into boxes prior to pre-cooling benefits the horticultural cool chain by facilitating large-scale cooling and transport. A cooling prediction model that is applicable across many different packaging and product types would aid optimisation of packaging systems and operating conditions. This paper presents a new preliminary model, applied to a single box of kiwifruit wrapped in a polyliner. X-ray tomography was used to determine the exact bulk fruit shape; and was then divided into a small set of space averaged zones. The properties of each zone were determined in an automated fashion, based on the local porosity. The resulting cooling predictions reached unity with a resolution of just 125 zones, representing a solution time of only 42 seconds for 20 hours of simulated cooling. Being fast and flexible, the model will be validated against a real-world box of kiwifruit, being cooled in a refrigerated wind tunnel.