Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards Enhanced Chlorine Control: Mathematical Modeling For Free Chlorine Kinetics During Fresh-Cut Carrot, Cabbage And Lettuce Washing, Parthasarathy Srinivasan, Mohammadreza Dehghan Abnavi, Anthony Sulak, Chandrasekhar R. Kothapalli, Daniel Munther

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

In this study, we developed a novel produce-specific mechanistic model to predict free chlorine (FC) dynamics during washing of disk-cut carrots, cut cabbage, and cut iceberg lettuce, in 3 L and 50–100 L tanks, and of shredded iceberg lettuce in 3200 L pilot-plant trials. Ranges for two key parameters: β (L mg−1 min−1) the apparent reaction rate constant of FC with produce constituents, and γ, the fraction of the increase of chemical oxygen demand (COD) contributing to the reaction, were determined at the 3 L scale. For disk carrots β∈[0.05,0.09] and γ∈[0.054,0.078], for cut cabbage β∈[0.05,0.10] and γ∈[0.09,0.12], and for …