Abstract: Numerical simulation of food and bioprocesses has continuously increased not only because its importance has been recognized but also as suitable computational tools have been developed and employed. Accordingly, lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) has become an alternative and powerful numerical technique to simulate a variety of transport phenomena. This lecture particularly focuses on LBM fundamentals as well as on its application to problems of agroindustrial interest involving heat and mass transfer. LBM treats the medium as a collection of constituent particles occupying and traveling between a number of lattice sites while following two computational steps referred to as “streaming” and “collision”. During the later (which renders time evolution), particles mutually collide and are rearranged as they arrive at lattice sites. During the former (which yields spatial evolution), collision results are transported to adjacent sites as particles travel along pre-defined directions. By imposing that such particle dynamics obey basic conservation principles while being isotropic, macroscopic medium behavior can be properly simulated. LBM simulation results are presented and discussed for processes like supercritical fluid extraction and biospecific affinity chromatography in fixed-bed equipment (which evoke convective-diffusive species transfer besides sorption-desorption kinetics between solid and fluid phases) as well as blast-cooling of catering meals (which involves heat transfers under either zero-order or first-order modeling with respect to spatial variation of foodstuff temperature).

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Jose Rabi received B.Sc. degree in Applied Physics from the University of Sao Paulo in 1995, M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Aeronautical Institute of Technology in 1998 and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Campinas in 2002 (all aforesaid degrees in Brazil). In 2003-2004 he joined the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary (Canada), as a postdoctoral fellow and in 2009-2010 he joined the Research Unit for Refrigeration Process Engineering (GPAN) of CEMAGREF (France) as a research fellow. From 2002 to 2004, he was affiliated to the Catholic University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), mostly teaching Numerical Methods as well as Transport Phenomena to Civil Engineering undergraduate courses, and since 2005 he has been a full professor at the Faculty of Animal Science and Food Engineering, University of Sao Paulo. His current research interests include modeling and simulation of agroindustrial processes, with particular attention to lattice-Boltzmann methods. He is author of about 30 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings and also of 2 invited international book chapters.