Study on Non-Thermal Food Processing Utilizing an Underwater Shockwave

In this paper, a novel non-thermal food processing system utilizing an underwater shockwave is proposed to process food at high speed. In the non-thermal food processing, target foods are crushed by an underwater shockwave generated by a high voltage. Unlike conventional non-thermal food processing systems, the proposed system has a high voltage multiplier which can generate the underwater shockwave at high speed. Therefore, the proposed system can achieve a high production capacity. The validity of the proposed high voltage multiplier is confirmed by the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) simulation. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed system is verified by demonstrating the proposed system by the experiments. In the experiments, an apple is softened by discharging 3.5kV stepped-up voltage.