Gerhard Schleining

The formation of fouling deposits on heat exchanger surfaces is one of the major concerns in thermal processes. The fouling behavior of food materials is complex, and its mechanism remains, in general, unclear. This study was aimed at developing a predictive model for soymilk fouling deposit formed on heated surfaces using dimensional analysis. Relevant variables affecting fouling deposit mass could be grouped into six dimensionless terms using Buckingham’s pi-theorem. Experimental data were obtained from a lab-scale plate heat exchanger. A simple model developed using the experimental data under the process conditions with the product inlet temperature, the product outlet temperature, and plate surface temperature in the ranges of 50–55 °C, 65–70 °C, and 70–85 °C, respectively, exhibited a good performance in the prediction of soymilk fouled mass. The correlation coefficient between the predicted and experimental values of fouled mass was 0.97 with an average relative error of 9.03%. Within the ranges of product inlet temperature and plate surfaces temperature studied, this model offers an opportunity to estimate soymilk fouling mass with acceptable accuracy.

Automatic fish recognition using deep learning and computer or machine vision is a key part of making the fish industry more productive through automation. An automatic sorting system will help to tackle the challenges of increasing food demand and the threat of food scarcity in the future due to the continuing growth of the world population and the impact of global warming and climate change. As far as the authors know, there has been no published work so far to detect and classify moving fish for the fish culture industry, especially for automatic sorting purposes based on the fish species using deep learning and machine vision. This paper proposes an approach based on the recognition algorithm YOLOv4, optimized with a unique labeling technique. The proposed method was tested with videos of real fish running on a conveyor, which were put randomly in position and order at a speed of 505.08 m/h and could obtain an accuracy of 98.15%. This study with a simple but effective method is expected to be a guide for automatically detecting, classifying, and sorting fish.