Simulation of Soft-Elastic Reactor to study the emptying process

Autor/a

Ge, Xuedan

Abstract

Food digestion is a multi-step process that strongly influences our health and wellbeing, so studying digestive processes has become a major topic in the field of Food Engineering. It involves many interlinked biological and engineering phenomena including enzymatic reactions, fluid mechanics, diffusion, and solid deformation, acting over multiple length scales. In order to understand digestion, mouth, stomach, small intestine and large intestine can then be further described by a set of unit operations that parallel the physiological mechanisms present within each process. Their functions can be paired with analogous industrial unit operations: mixer, bioreactor, and storage vessel. The key variables and characteristic parameters of these unit operations may then be used to model . Such as Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which allows engineers to model sophisticated, real-life physical systems. In the stomach, food boluses are mixed with gastric secretions (electrolytes, enzymes, mucus and HCl). Gastric emptying is the process by which the contents of the stomach are moved into the duodenum. The food boluses are broken down by peristaltic contractions of the gastric wall and chemical reactions which including acidic and enzymatic hydrolysis, finally use pylorus to control the release of food.
In order to understand the characteristics of gastric emptying process, experiments models and computational models are used in this work.

 

Director/a

Sempere Cebrián,, Julià
Dong Chen, Xiao ; Xiao, Jie

Degree

IQS SE - Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering

Date

2020-08-31