Thermal conductivity of milk with different levels of moisture and fat: Experimental measures and prediction models

Abstract

Thermal conductivity is one of the most influential properties affecting the pasteurization of milk and is highly dependent on the milk composition and the temperature used in the process. The purpose of this work was to model the thermal conductivity of milk with a moisture content from 88.3 to 91.2% and fat content from 0 to 3.5% from 20 to 80°C. For milk with a lower moisture percentage, the experimental conductivity ranged from 0.560 to 0.637 W m-1 K-1, and for those samples with a higher moisture percentage, conductivity ranged from 0.584 to 0.652 W m-1 K-1. Three theoretical predictive models, series, parallel and Maxwell-Eucken, which use food composition data, were tested, and polynomial functions were fit to model the behavior of this property as a function of moisture and fat content. The results showed that thermal conductivity values are linearly dependent on the moisture content and inversely dependent on the fat content. Among the models, the parallel model was the best fit to the experimental data with a maximum error of 2.7%.