SUMMARY

Primary poultry chilling utilizes thermal cooling systems to ensure final product quality and safety. This processing step demands significant labor, energy, operational footprint, and, depending on the method of chilling, water as well. Correspondingly, the poultry processing industry is exploring paths to achieve higher energy efficiencies in poultry chilling, without compromising on rigid quality/safety standards, by continuously upgrading chiller technologies. Therefore, this thesis addresses these conservation issues in the area of in-line immersion chilling of poultry carcasses by identifying the issues with the incumbent process and proposing a novel approach to enhance the thermal/fluidic dynamics of the chilling process.

An applied research project is proposed to make automated in-line immersion chilling a more effective alternative for the poultry chilling process. The objective is to enhance the immersion chilling of “in-line” carcasses through alternate motion patterns through the superimposition of additional kinematics upon the typical translational paths of shackled carcasses. The project has a computational and experimental core that emphasizes characterizing and optimizing induced motion effects upon convective heat transfer. The expected outcome is the enhancement of immersion chilling of shackled/in-line carcasses.