Optimal Removal of Experimental Points to Determine Apparent Thermal Diffusivity of Canned Products

Abstract

Abstract To describe the transient heat conduction from or to a product, its thermo-physical properties must be known. If the boundary condition of the heat conduction equation is of the first kind, the process is governed by the thermal diffusivity α. Normally this property is determined by fit of the analytical solution with only the first term of the series to an experimental dataset of the temperature versus time, in which the temperature is measured in a known position. In this case, the value obtained for α contains errors due to the consideration of only one term and the inclusion of the first experimental points in the fit. This article presents an algorithm based on optimal removal of experimental points to minimize errors in the determination of α. The algorithm was validated and applied to heating of Agar gel. The precision and accuracy of the obtained result were, respectively, 0.38 and 0.6%.