Determining the Thermal Properties of the Pangasius Using a Dual Needle Heat-Pulse Sensor

Abstract

In the field of food cooling and freezing computation, the accurate determination of thermo-physical properties such as specific heat, thermal conductivity and density is necessary and specially important to optimize the energy consumption of equipment. These parameters depend on the food composition and temperature usually determined by theoretical or experimental method or the combination of both. Experimental method using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is the best approach to yield correct results. However, DSC method requires expensive equipment and it might be not suitable for limited funding in some Vietnamese research centers. Therefore, the line heat source was chosen in this study.This paper introduces a new approach to determine thermal properties of the Vietnamese Pangasius in the temperature range from-40 °C to +40 °C using the line heat source. The results indicated that there is good correllation between the obtained measured data and the results calculated using theoretical models as well as other published experimental results.