Heat transfer is one of the most important and most common engineering disciplines in food processing. There are many unit operations in the food industry where steady or unsteady state heat transfer is taking place. These operations are of primary importance and affect the design of equipment as well as safety, nutritional and sensory aspects of the product.

The chapters in this book deal mainly with: heat transfer applications; methods that have considerable physical property variations with temperature; methods not yet widely spread in the food industry; or methods that are less developed in the food engineering literature. The application of numerical methods has received special attention with a separate chapter as well as emphasis in almost every chapter. A chapter on artificial neural networks (ANN) has also been included since ANN is a promising alternative tool to conventional methods for modelling, optimization, etc in cases where a clear relationship between the variables is not known, or the system is too complex to be modelled with conventional mathematical methods.