Numerical Analysis of Cooling Characteristics of Indian mangoes using Digital Twin

Temperature is an important factor that controls the quality and shelf life of perishable produce after harvest. Hence during transcontinental export refrigerated container is used so as to minimize the degradation of food quality. This study aims to gain more insight into the cooling heterogeneity and quality decay of single Indian mangoes during export with the help of numerical modelling by computational fluid dynamics. For this purpose, digital twins of three most exported mango varieties namely Alphonso, Totapuri and Kesar, are created which accurately simulates the cooling behavior of real mango based on airflow rate and its temperature. Three airflow rates are modelled: 0.5 m/s, 2.5 m/s and 5.5 m/s. Kesar mango was found to have highest cooling rate and Totapuri mango the lowest. An increase in airflow rate was found to increase the cooling rate but up to a certain extent. A velocity of 2.5 m/s is considered optimum for cooling of mangoes and further increase does not have much effect on cooling rate. The overall quality variation is not much significant for different varieties of mango. The quality decay after one day was found to be 3% and 13% for different quality attributes.