Research Interests

My core focus is dairy & food process design. Design of dairy processes can begin at a very general level with decisions about product mix and overall flowsheets. This is followed by the design of individual processes and many of the designs, such as evaporators and membrane filtration plants, can be done from engineering fundamentals. One aim of this research is to develop design methodologies for as many aspects of dairy processing as possible. Such designs often require more fundamental scientific information, especially physical properties. Recently projects to obtain such information include production of the omega-3 fatty acid EPA from algae, physical properties of honey, ion speciation in milk, falling-film minimum wetting rates, surface tension, contact angle, viscosity of dairy products.

Some processes in the dairy industry can be understood better by developing models. Models of ultrafiltration, cheese production and evaporator flows have been developed to show which parts of a design are most important. This work will be extended to cover many other dairy processes.

Project themes include:
- Design of dairy processes
- Physical properties of dairy products
- Ion speciation and solubility in milk
- Falling film wetting in evaporators
- Protein ion-exchange
- Dielectric properties of foods
- Ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis: membrane failure and fouling
- Properties of concentrated sugar solutions including honey
- Crystallisation from viscous solutions
- EPA fatty acid from microalgae