Freezing time-temperature behavior and parametric study of cylindrical shaped tylose gel samples: A numerical and experimental study

•The freezing-times are calculated numerically as well as experimentally.•Tylose samples are frozen to −18 °C to obtain higher shelf-life.•Thermo-physical properties are used as a function of temperature.•Temperature-dependent thermal properties are implemented in the numerical model. A one-dimensional unsteady state numerical model has been developed to predict the freezing time of individual cylindrical foodstuff and freezing experiments have been conducted to validate the model. The model’s numerical algorithm is a finite-difference method with an explicit scheme, which is solved using MATLAB to estimate the freezing time of cylindrical tylose gel sample while freezing it to −18 °C. In all cases, the value of linear regression correlation coefficients (R2) between experimental and predicted values are over 0.989, which indicates that the model can be used to predict the freezing time-temperature variation of cylindrical foodstuff with variable thermo-physical properties. The effect of two parameters viz., cooling air temperature and cooling air velocity on freezing time has also been studied for which the cooling air velocity has been varied in the range of 2.5 m/s to 5.5 m/s and cooling air temperature from −22.2 °C to −31.1 °C.