SYNOPSIS OF THE TALK

The processing of foods involves several stages. Quality may undergo changes mainly degradation at each stage. As foods are generally sensitive to heat, therefore they tend to undergo significant quality deterioration when subjected to heat treatment such as thermal drying. Further, some food materials may not be suitable to be processed in long duration.  Volatile compounds may be loss; physical quality attributes may be degraded.  The degree of degradation is proportional to processing time. In addition, food products should be processed and/or dried until a state that is below the level susceptible to growth of microorganism, typically at water activity level of less than 0.6. Apart from this, product quality is often related to various physical and chemical parameters. This talk will focus on the quality changes aspect on taste, colour, texture, size, shape, microbiological and nutrition and how these qualities attributes may be degraded due to improper processing and drying.


BIODATA OF SPEAKERS

Ir. Dr. Law Chung Lim is an Associate Professor with the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, The University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus. He is a chartered engineer, chartered scientist in the UK and a professional engineer in Malaysia. He is also a fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK. Ir Dr Law has more than 12 years of experience in research and development in the area of industrial drying and fluidized bed processing. He has also conducted extensive research work on processing of bio-origin products, mainly focus on the retention of bio-active ingredients in the dehydrated products. Over the years, Ir Dr Law designed a number of industrial dehydrator for the processing of bio-origin products, namely baffled fluidized bed dryer, 2-stage cross flow fluidized bed dryer, intermittent heat pump dryer, hybrid heat pump dryer and low temperature dehydrator. He has published about 50 journal papers, 15 book chapters including 2 encyclopedia chapters and 2 handbook chapters and presented more than 10 keynotes/invited speeches and more than 100 papers in conferences and seminars.