PLENARY SPEAKER

Modelling and Simulation for Real-time Food Quality Prediction

Dr. Eng. Wei Yu
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Duration

40 Minutes

Abstract

Food processing is an industry that is of primary importance to many economies, including Canada and especially New Zealand where many products have a clean, green and/or healthy image that is important to their final market. It is a diverse industry that ranges in business scale from small, even iconic brands to large enterprises of global reach. Food processing involves the chemical and physical processing of materials from the nano to the macro scale to produce food products of desired properties, structure and function. Industry drivers can be categorised under headings of product quality and traceability, process costs, and product safety and production sustainability, with inputs to these processes from consumer trends, regulatory requirements, resource costs, seasonal variations, weather conditions and new technology.
The modern approach to supporting and enhancing the food processing industry entitled ‘Real-time Quality’ is primarily described in this talk. This is built on Process Systems Engineering and Process Analytical Technology approaches and includes a move to real-time quality prediction and control as opposed to post production quality testing. Current work into the real-time prediction of milk powder functional properties is described for Fonterra Co-Operative Group Ltd., the world’s biggest trader of dairy powder.

Biography of the Plenary Speaker

Dr. Wei Yu starts his new career as a lecturer of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Auckland at 2012. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 2015. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Industrial Information and Control Centre (I2C2), Faculty of Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand from 2008 to 2011. He received his B.E. (1993) degree in Chemical Engineering from Liaoning University of Petroleum and Chemical Technology, Fushun, P.R. China, Master (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) degree in Chemical Engineering from the Queen’s University, Canada. He worked as a process engineer at West Pacific Petrochemical Company, Dalian, P.R. China from 1993-1999. His main research interests include control performance assessment, analysis of variance, process control and system identification