Simulation of an industrial cheese chilling process

•CFD model of simulated industrial cheese chilling process.•CFD model can predict to within 1 °C compared to experimental data.•Exponential models for industrial chilling of cheddar cheese and mozzarella cheese. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was developed to simulate an industrial cheese chilling process. Forced air chilling experiments were performed on blocks of agar (cheese analogue) to simulate the airflow and product arrangement in a section of an industrial cheese chilling tunnel. The flow field was solved at steady-state and decoupled from the heat transfer processes. The six blocks of agar were placed in a polystyrene test chamber that was in turn placed in an environmental testing chamber. Temperatures were measured at the surfaces and the geometric centre of the tested blocks of agar. Good agreement was observed between predicted and experimental data. Having been validated, the model was used to generate simple correlation models for predicting the volume-averaged temperature of blocks of cheddar cheese and mozzarella cheese during industrial chilling