Project

Conceptual process design of mushroom processing

Supervisor: Dr. RGM van der Sman

Introduction

Current industrial processing of mushroom is quite traditional. The processing involves unit operations such as evacuation and sterilization, both of which need intensive usage of water and energy. The processing also degrades the mushroom both in terms of quantity and quality. In this work, we work on a complete redesign of the mushroom processing using modern tools, such as conceptual process design and thermodynamics of soft matter.


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Figure: Stages in conceptual process design of mushroom processing

Objective and approach

The main objective of the project is to make mushroom processing a more sustainable business. To realize the objective, we rethink the process all over to come to a more sustainable process. The process also makes mushroom to retain more of its natural moisture in its structure leading to a higher yield at the end of processing.

BSc/MSc-Thesis

Are you interested in working towards making the mushroom processing business a more sustainable one? Do you have novel ideas and motivation to do so? Within this project there are several possibilities for BSc/MSc theses.

  1. Excergy analysis of current mushroom processing and intensified mushroom processing (master thesis student).

  2. Process intensification on mushroom processing

  3. Water holding capacity (WHC) and yield of the final product: A. Protein chain length, B. pH and ionic strength of mushroom blanch/hydration water

  4. Using novel technologies (for eg. High pressure processing, microwave heating, ohmic heating and plasma processing) for mushroom processing.